Robert Louis Stevenson

When one reads the nonfiction work of Robert Louis Stevenson along with the novels and short stories, a more complete portrait emerges of the author than that of the romantic graze one usually associates with his best-known fiction. The Stevenson of the nonfiction prose is a writer involved in the issues of his craft, his milieu, and his soul. Moreover, one can see the record book of his maturation in critical essays, political tracts, biographies, and letters to family and friends. What Stevenson lacks, especially for the tastes of this age, is specificity and expertise: he has not the depth of such writers as John Ruskin, Walter Pater, or William Morris. But he was a acuate observer of humankind, and his essays reveal his lively and perspicacious mind. Though he lacked originality, he created a rapport with the reader, who senses his enthusiastic embrace of keep and art. If Stevenson at first wrote like one who only plane the surface of experience, by the end of his life he was stormily committed to his adopted land of Samoa, to his own history, and to the creation of his fiction. Robert Louis Stevenson was natural to Thomas and Margaret Isabella Balfour Stevenson in Edinburgh on 13 November 1850. From the beginning he was sickly.

Through much of his childhood he was attended by his faithful nurse, Alison Cunningham, known as Cummy in the family circle. She told him morbid stories about the Covenanters (the Scots Presbyterian martyrs), read aloud to him Victorian penny-serial novels, Bible stories, and the Psalms, and cut the catechism into him, all with his parents approval. Thomas Stevenson was quite a storyteller himself, and his wife doted on their only child, sitting in admiration eon her precocious son expounded on religious dogma. Stevenson inevitably reacted to the morbidness of his religious education and to the stiffness of his familys middle-class values, but that confusion would come only after he entered Edinburgh University. The... If you want to bestow a full essay, order it on our website: Orderessay

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