STORYTELLER

“Not born for this age.”

Damrosch is one of the preeminent literary biographers of our time, and this magnificent biography of Robert Louis Stevenson reveals much about a writer that we think we knew. Details of childhood reading, adult adventures, and professional ambition abound. Damrosch shows how important Stevenson’s marriage was to the creation of his fictions. Fanny Stevenson and her sister, Nellie, come alive here in rich quotations from biographies and letters. Nellie’s assessment of her sister and brother-in-law’s marriage is a fulcrum on which the book balances: “Her profound faith in his genius before the rest of the world had come to recognize it had a great deal to do with keeping up his faith in himself.” Theirs was a marriage of “anarchic excitement,” and Damrosch limns their life together with all the vividness of a 19th-century melodramatist. Family is one thing. Land is another: Scotland, California, Samoa. Damrosch makes the point that it was the physical environment that stimulated Stevenson—that his writing comes not simply from his own imagination, but from the interaction of that imagination with landscape. Stevenson’s best fictions, therefore, have all the realism and coherence of a great map. Treasure Island succeeds not so much on the depth of its characters but on the vigor of its realism. Damrosch quotes Stevenson: “The great creative writer shows us the realization and the apotheosis of the daydreams of common men. His stories may be nourished with the realities of life, but their true mark is to satisfy the nameless longings of the reader, and to obey the ideal laws of the daydream.” Stevenson’s life and work meet at the intersection of reality and daydream, longing and satisfaction. Damrosch makes the real seem dreamed and the dreamed real.

A dazzling life of Robert Louis Stevenson, centering on family and landscape as the axes of his imagination.