Louis Callow, Philip

Philip Callow ''s splendidly readable biography of Robert Louis Stevenson recounts the life of Scotland ''s finest writer of English prose and the author of such classics as Treasure Island and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. A sickly child, Louis became in turn a bohemian dandy, a literary gypsy traipsing through the mountains of France with a donkey, and at twenty-eight the lover of an American woman ten years his senior, the fabulous Fanny. His feelings are always his reasons, said Henry James, and caught in a sentence the secret of Stevenson ''s popularity as one of the last of the classic storytellers. Stevenson was destined to be a modern man. James Campbell, New York Times Book Review. Illustrated.

Annotation:
Callow's biography of Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) stresses the brevity of Stevenson's life and the immense amount of travel he managed to pack into it. He also discusses Stevenson in relation to other tubercular writers, such as Chekhov and D.H. Lawrence. Illustrated with black-and-white photographs.

Praise

Kirkus Reviews
"This is clearly a labor of love, and the reader cannot help but share the biographer's fascination with the vagaries of this peripatetic, sickly rebel....Knowledgeable RLS students will find no new information....; newcomers to Stevenson will get no introduction either to his work or to the world of Victorian letters and manners from which he was in constant flight." 02/15/2001

Contents

Foreword............................................................ix
PART I
    1. Why Has God Got a Hell?.......................................5
    2. The Noise of Pens Writing....................................21
    3. The Thunderbolt Has Fallen...................................38
    4. Remember That I Come of a Gloomy Family......................52
    5. To Marry Is to Domesticate the Recording Angel...............74
    6. The Great Affair Is to Move..................................91
PART II
    7. A Shipful of Failures.......................................113
    8. All Kinds of Miseries Here..................................130
    9. The Wolverine on My Own Shoulders...........................146
    10. Flutes of Silence..........................................170
    11. A Steam Press Called the Vandegrifter......................189
    12. The Purity of Forests......................................210
PART III
    13. Get Out Your Big Atlas.....................................231
    14. To See These Dread Creatures Smile.........................251
    15. It Does Make You Feel Well.................................265
    16. Do I Look Strange?.........................................288
Postscript.........................................................307
Acknowledgments....................................................311
Chronology.........................................................313
Works by Robert Louis Stevenson....................................315
Selected Bibliography..............................................317
Index..............................................................321

Product Attributes

Book Format:		Hardcover
Number of Pages:		0336
Publisher:		Ivan R. Dee Publisher

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Louis A Life of Robert Louis Stevenson (Hardcover)

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