Overview

Best known for his fiction writing, Treasure Island and Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde being among his most famous, the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson was also an essayist, journalist, poet and the author of travel books. Stevenson's first major work was An Inland Voyage (1878), an account of the journey he made by canoe from Antwerp to northern France. The companion work to this, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879), is recognised as a classic of the travel-writing genre. In this seminal compilation, June Skinner Sawyers has brought together a varied selection of RLS's best travel writings. They take the reader around the world, shadowing his life as his ill health took him from Scotland to England, to Europe and on to America and finally across the Pacific to Samoa where he died. A table of contents is attached to this AIS

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9781903238622

Table of Contents

Reviews

Good travel writing never loses its appeal, and this selection shows a master of the genre at work. Born in Scotland in 1850, Robert Louis Stevenson packed a great deal of travelling, writing and varied experience into his comparatively short life, and in the poem 'The Vagabond', the epigraph to this collection, wrote the creed of the true traveller: all he wanted was the heaven above him and the road below him. Destination was not necessarily important. 'The great affair is to move,' opined RLS, and move he did, despite frail health. The book contains essays about his birthplace, and about that very contrasting place, England; then there are accounts of his sojourns in France, Belgium and Switzerland, his honeymoon journey to America, and finally descriptions of life in his spiritual home, the South Seas. Editor Sawyers argues convincingly that Stevenson, a generous and humane man, was an early literary rebel, inquisitive and optimistic, who predated writers such as Jack Kerouac and Bruce Chatwin, and many others who found travel a liberating experience. Like most of his fellows, Stevenson approached the world at a slight angle, and could always find something to see and comment upon. He had a loving eye for a domestic scene, was a keen observer of all forms of life, writing vivid descriptions of nature in its variety, and usually enjoyed his many random encounters along the road. Stevenson is not to be read merely for his adventures, however. He was a versatile writer whose prose is graceful and stylish, while much of his poetry lives on, as does his philosophy of life. This book, whether read straight through or dipped into, will give all travellers and dedicated readers many hours of pleasure. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

June Skinner Sawyers is one of America's most prolific authors on Scottish and Celtic-related material and is a recognised authority on travel literature in Scotland. She edited and compiled The Road North, 300 Years of Classic Scottish Travel Writing.

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