Robert Louis Stevenson
Essays in the Art of Writing and Fables
Seven Classic Essays & Twenty Fables
"Me gustan los relojes de arena, los mapas, la tipografí a del siglo XVIII, las etimologí as, el sabor del café y la prosa de Stevenson," wrote Jorge Luis Borges in Borges y yo (1960) "I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, etymologies, the taste of coffee, and Robert Louis Stevenson's prose."
Essays on the Art of Writing collects seven important essays on
authorship, including "On Some Technical Elements of Style" and "The
Morality of the Profession of Letters," as well as Robert Louis
Stevenson's accounts of writing Treasure Island and The Master of
Ballantrae. Written more than a century ago, these essays are full of
insight for today's readers and brimming with still-applicable wisdom
for modern writers.
Stevenson's collection of twenty Fables has little to do with conventional lessons of right and wrong. His allegorical parables offer, instead, what the author called "tail foremost moralities." Stevenson slices through societal façades of hypocrisy, bigotry, and stupidity with sardonic wit more akin to Monty Python than Aesop. Some of the darker tales may remind one of the works of Edgar Allan Poe or Ambrose Bierce. Odd and evocative, amusing and thought provoking, Stevenson's fables might prove more appropriate for our day and age than his own.
A posthumous collection, Essays on the Art of Writing (also known as The Art of Writing and Other Essays) was first published in 1905 by Chatto and Windus. The collected Fables was also a postumous publication. Stevenson proposed a book of fables to publisher Longmans, Green and Co. in the spring of 1888, but never presented the publisher with a manuscript. After his death in 1894, the fables he had written were published by Longmans in its magazine (1895). The following year, they were included in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with Other Fables, a new edition of his famous 1886 novella. The fables were first published separately in 1902 by Longmans, Green and Co. in an illustrated edition with six etchings by Ethel King Martyn. Although both collections have been reprinted in several forms, this is the first time the two have been combined in a one-volume edition.
Trade Paperback (6" X 9") / $10.95 / 140 pages
ISBN: 0-9742907-1-8
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Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson (originally Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson)
was born in Edinburgh on 13 November 1850. Forty-four years later, he
died on the small island of Upolu in what is now Western Samoa in the
South Pacific. Although often beset by poor health as both a child and
an adult, this did not stop him from becoming a respected and popular
author, travelling the world, defying convention, and making himself a
legend within his own lifetime. Edmond Gosse called him "the most
beloved of all the authors" of his time; Henry James, called Stevenson
"the only man in England who can write a decent English sentence" and
Rudyard Kipling
idolized him. In the first twenty years after his death (1894-1914),
Stevenson continued to be critically acclaimed.
After 1914, however, he was considered outmoded. His literary
greatness was questioned; his bohemian persona was psychoanalyzed
and trivialized. The negative view of RLS began to be revised in 1947 with
a biography by David Daiches. He is now regarded as a writer of power,
imagination, and originality. Stevenson's sympathetic appreciation of Polynesian culture and
criticism of British and American exploitation has also added to his stature as an author.
The Robert Louis Stevenson Web Site
Robert Louis Steveson by Jenni Calder
