Robert Louis Stevenson: His Best Pacific Writings
"At the peak of his literary powers, Robert Louis Stevenson, age 37, sailed on a small hired schooner into the almost uncharted vastness of the Pacific Ocean. There, the ailing author found "my bones were sweeter to me." To the perplexity of his public in America and Europe, he "decided to remain." His last six years were spent cruising the Pacific's myriad islands, making close friends of kings, princesses, islanders, traders and riffraff settlers, and making a home for his family on Upolu,...
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"At the peak of his literary powers, Robert Louis Stevenson, age 37, sailed on a small hired schooner into the almost uncharted vastness of the Pacific Ocean. There, the ailing author found "my bones were sweeter to me." To the perplexity of his public in America and Europe, he "decided to remain." His last six years were spent cruising the Pacific's myriad islands, making close friends of kings, princesses, islanders, traders and riffraff settlers, and making a home for his family on Upolu, Western Samoa. His romantic life and early death there have become one of the world's enduring literary legends. Albert Wendt, the Pacific's most respected living author, writes in his Foreword of the huge mythology of Stevenson's years in Samoa." "Yet the books he wrote in and about the Pacific have been neglected and misunderstood. A public that wanted more adventure yarns like Treasure Island or science fiction horror stories like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was puzzled when he wrote about the Pacific as it really was, and in part still is." Robert Louis Stevenson: His Best Pacific Writings shows that the books he wrote there are among his very best. It collects for the first time a selection across the full range of forms he tried - fiction of violence, of romance and of magic, vivid travel writing, autobiography, history, instant-book journalism, poetry, ballads, fables, letters, speeches and prayers. It lets them speak for themselves, and it links them with a commentary. Above all, it illuminates a major writer's artistic struggle to craft a language and a style for the world's greatest unexplored subject.
