Storyteller

From a critically acclaimed biographer, an engrossing narrative of Robert Louis Stevenson’s life, a story as romantic and adventurous as his fiction

Best of 2025 Lists: Wall Street Journal, Top 10 • Economist • Times Literary Supplement • Air Mail, Top 10 • Christian Science Monitor, Top 25 • Washington Post, Notable Works of Nonfiction

“Damrosch brings to Stevenson’s life the calm, humane interpretive powers that he deployed with such success in . . . The Club. . . . [An] excellent book.”—Meghan Cox Gurdon, Wall Street Journal
 
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) is famed for Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but he published many other novels and stories before his death at forty-four. Despite lifelong ill health, he had immense vitality; Mark Twain said his eyes burned with “smoldering rich fire.” Born in Edinburgh to a family of lighthouse engineers, Stevenson set many stories in Scotland but sought travel and adventure in a life as romantic as his novels. “I loved a ship,” he wrote, “as a man loves burgundy or daybreak.” The adventures were shared with his free-spirited American wife, Fanny, with whom he moved to the South Pacific.
 
Samoan friends named Stevenson “Storyteller.” Reading, he said, “should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves.” His own books have been translated into dozens of languages. Jorge Luis Borges called his stories “one of the forms of happiness,” and other modernist masters as various as Proust, Nabokov, and Calvino have paid tribute to his greatness as a literary artist.
 
In Storyteller, Leo Damrosch brings to life an unforgettable personality, illuminated by many who knew Stevenson well and drawing from thousands of the writer’s letters in his many voices and moods—playful, imaginative, at times tragic.