Robert louis stevenson family
Life is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt and poignant; a work of art, in comparison, is neat, finite, self-contained, rational, flowing, and emasculate The novel, which is a work of art, exists, not by its resemblances to life, which are forced and material It is not clear, however, that in this there was any real basis for disagreement with James.
Written as a story for boys, Stevenson had thought it in "no need of psychology or fine writing", but its success is credited with liberating children's writing from the "chains of Victorian didacticism ". During his college years, Stevenson briefly identified himself as a "red-hot socialist". But already by age 26 he was writing of looking back on this time "with something like regret.
Now I know that in thus turning Conservative with years, I am going through the normal cycle of change and travelling in the common orbit of men's opinions. But this was against a markedly illiberal challenger, the historian Thomas Carlyle. Legislation "grows authoritative, grows philanthropical, bristles with new duties and new penalties, and casts a spawn of inspectors, who now begin, note-book in hand, to darken the face of England".
Stevenson cautioned that this "new waggon-load of laws" points to a future in which our grandchildren might "taste the pleasures of existence in something far liker an ant-heap that any previous human polity". Freedom to be desirable, involves kindness, wisdom, and all the virtues of the free; but the free man as we have seen him in action has been, as of yore, only the master of many helots; and the slaves are still ill-fed, ill-clad, ill-taught, ill-housed, insolently entreated, and driven to their mines and workshops by the lash of famine.
Robert louis stevenson author biography sample
In January , aged 37, in response to American press coverage of the Land War in Ireland, Stevenson penned a political essay rejected by Scribner's magazine and never published in his lifetime that advanced a broadly conservative theme: the necessity of "staying internal violence by rigid law". Notwithstanding his title, "Confessions of a Unionist ", Stevenson defends neither the union with Britain she had "majestically demonstrated her incapacity to rule Ireland" nor "landlordism" scarcely more defensible in Ireland than, as he had witnessed it, in the goldfields of California.
Rather he protests the readiness to pass "lightly" over crimes—"unmanly murders and the harshest extremes of boycotting "—where these are deemed "political". This he argues is to "defeat law" which is ever a "compromise" and to invite "anarchy": it is "the sentimentalist preparing the pathway for the brute". The vessel "plowed her path of snow across the empty deep, far from all track of commerce, far from any hand of help.
He befriended the king's niece Princess Victoria Kaiulani , who also had Scottish heritage. During this period, he completed The Master of Ballantrae , composed two ballads based on the legends of the islanders, and wrote The Bottle Imp. He preserved the experience of these years in his various letters and in his In the South Seas which was published posthumously.
Fanny misnames the ship in her account The Cruise of the Janet Nichol. In December , year-old Stevenson and his extended family arrived at the port of Apia in the Samoan islands and there he and Fanny decided to settle. Fanny's sister, Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez, wrote that "it was in Samoa that the word 'home' first began to have a real meaning for these gypsy wanderers".
While his wife set about managing and working the estate, year-old Stevenson took the native name Tusitala Samoan for "Teller of Tales" , and began collecting local stories. Often he would exchange these for his own tales. The first work of literature in Samoan was his translation of The Bottle Imp , [ 84 ] which presents a Pacific-wide community as the setting for a moral fable.
Immersing himself in the islands' culture, occasioned a "political awakening": it placed Stevenson "at an angle" to the rival great powers , Britain, Germany and the United States whose warships were common sights in Samoan harbours. As the external pressures upon Samoan society grew, tensions soon descended into several inter-clan wars. No longer content to be a "romancer", Stevenson became a reporter and an agitator, firing off letters to The Times which "rehearsed with an ironic twist that surely owed something to his Edinburgh legal training", a tale of European and American misconduct.
In an effort he feared might result in his own deportation, Stevenson helped secure the recall of two European officials. A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa was a detailed chronicle of the intersection of rivalries between the great powers and the first Samoan Civil War. As much as he said he disdained politics—"I used to think meanly of the plumber", he wrote to his friend Sidney Colvin, "but how he shines beside the politician!
He openly allied himself with chief Mataafa, whose rival Malietoa was backed by the Germans whose firms were beginning to monopolise copra and cocoa bean processing. Stevenson was alarmed above all by what he perceived as the Samoans' economic innocence—their failure to secure their claim to proprietorship of the land in a Lockean sense [ 89 ] through improving management and labour.
In just months before his death, he addressed the island chiefs: [ 90 ]. There is but one way to defend Samoa. Hear it before it is too late. It is to make roads, and gardens, and care for your trees, and sell their produce wisely, and, in one word, to occupy and use your country It will not continue to be yours or your children's, if you occupy it for nothing.
You and your children will, in that case, be cast out into outer darkness". He had "seen these judgments of God", not only in Hawaii where abandoned native churches stood like tombstones "over a grave, in the midst of the white men's sugar fields", but also in Ireland and "in the mountains of my own country Scotland". These were a fine people in the past brave, gay, faithful, and very much like Samoans, except in one particular, that they were much wiser and better at that business of fighting of which you think so much.
But the time came to them as it now comes to you, and it did not find them ready Stevenson wrote an estimated , words during his years on Samoa. Rather he is a man of limited understanding and imagination, comfortable with his own prejudices: where, he wonders, can he find "whites" for his "half caste" daughters.
The villains are white, their behaviour towards the islanders ruthlessly duplicitous. Stevenson wrote to his friend Sidney Colvin :. It is the first realistic South Seas story; I mean with real South Sea character and details of life. Everybody else that has tried, that I have seen, got carried away by the romance, and ended in a kind of sugar candy sham epic, and the whole effect was lost Now I have got the smell and look of the thing a good deal.
You will know more about the South Seas after you have read my little tale than if you had read a library. The Ebb-Tide , the misadventures of three deadbeats marooned in the Tahitian port of Papeete , has been described as presenting "a microcosm of imperialist society, directed by greedy but incompetent whites, the labour supplied by long-suffering natives who fulfil their duties without orders and are true to the missionary faith which the Europeans make no pretence of respecting".
The first sentence reads: "Throughout the island world of the Pacific, scattered men of many European races and from almost every grade of society carry activity and disseminate disease". No longer was Stevenson writing about human nature "in terms of a contest between Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde": "the edges of moral responsibility and the margins of moral judgement were too blurred".
With his imagination still residing in Scotland and returning to earlier form, Stevenson also wrote Catriona , a sequel to his earlier novel Kidnapped , continuing the adventures of its hero David Balfour. Although he felt, as a writer, that "there was never any man had so many irons in the fire". But in a last burst of energy he began work on Weir of Hermiston.
On 3 December , Stevenson was talking to his wife and straining to open a bottle of wine when he suddenly exclaimed, "What's that? This would explain his chronic respiratory complaints, recurrent episodes of pulmonary haemorrhage, and his early death. It might also explain his mother's hitherto unreported but apparent stroke, at age 38 years.
After his death, the Samoans insisted on surrounding his body with a watch-guard during the night and on bearing him on their shoulders to nearby Mount Vaea , where they buried him on a spot overlooking the sea on land donated by British Acting Vice Consul Thomas Trood. Under the wide and starry sky Dig the grave and let me lie Glad did I live and gladly die And I laid me down with a will This be the verse you grave for me Here he lies where he longed to be Home is the sailor home from the sea And the hunter home from the hill.
What is a author biography: Robert Louis Stevenson was a 19th-century Scottish writer notable for such novels as 'Treasure Island,' 'Kidnapped' and 'Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.'.
Stevenson was loved by the Samoans, and his tombstone epitaph was translated to a Samoan song of grief. On the western side the biblical passage of Ruth —17 is inscribed:. Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: And thy people shall be my people, and thy God shall be my God: Where thou diest will I die, and there will I be buried.
The ensign flag draped over his coffin in Samoa was returned to Edinburgh and now resides in a glass case over the fireplace of rooms in Edinburgh University's Old College owned by The Speculative Society , of which he was a member. His heirs sold his papers during World War I, and many Stevenson documents were auctioned off in Chesterton , who said that Stevenson "seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins.
Stevenson was seen for much of the 20th century as a second-class writer. He became relegated to children's literature and horror genres, [ ] condemned by literary figures such as Virginia Woolf daughter of his early mentor Leslie Stephen and her husband Leonard Woolf , and he was gradually excluded from the canon of literature taught in schools.
The late 20th century brought a re-evaluation of Stevenson as an artist of great range and insight, a literary theorist, an essayist and social critic, a witness to the colonial history of the Pacific Islands and a humanist. Rider Haggard. On the subject of Stevenson's modern reputation, American film critic Roger Ebert wrote in ,. I was talking to a friend the other day who said he'd never met a child who liked reading Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island.
Neither have I, I said. And he'd never met a child who liked reading Stevenson's Kidnapped. Me neither, I said. My early exposure to both books was via the Classics Illustrated comic books. But I did read the books later, when I was no longer a kid, and I enjoyed them enormously. Same goes for Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
The fact is, Stevenson is a splendid writer of stories for adults, and he should be put on the same shelf with Joseph Conrad and Jack London instead of in between Winnie the Pooh and Peter Pan. The Writers' Museum near Edinburgh's Royal Mile devotes a room to Stevenson, containing some of his personal possessions from childhood through to adulthood.
Stevenson's house Skerryvore, at the head of Alum Chine , was severely damaged by bombs during a destructive and lethal raid in the Bournemouth Blitz. Despite a campaign to save it, the building was demolished.
A statue of the Skerryvore lighthouse is present on the site. Robert Louis Stevenson Avenue in Westbourne is named after him. The small hotel in Wick where Stevenson stayed in the summer of is now called Stevenson House and is marked by a plaque. The house is near the harbour, in the part of Wick known as Pultneytown. Alongside Stevenson's portrait are scenes from some of his books and his house in Western Samoa.
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The first note to be printed was sent to Samoa in time for their centenary celebrations on 3 December In , it was announced a Jekyll and Hyde—themed sculpture would be built near where Skerryvore once stood. The Stevenson House museum is graced with a bas-relief depicting the sickly author writing in bed. All the holes at Spyglass Hill are named after characters and places in the novel.
Helena, California, is home to over 11, objects and artifacts, the majority of which belonged to Stevenson. Opened in , the museum houses such treasures as his childhood rocking chair, writing desk, toy soldiers and personal writings among many other items. The museum is free to the public and serves as an academic archive for students, writers and Stevenson enthusiasts.
In , there was controversy about the San Francisco statue. Jenny Leung, executive director of the Chinese Culture Center , stated "There were a lot of vocal opinions about how Robert Louis Stevenson had nothing to do with Chinatown. A lot of those comments. Stevenson School in Pebble Beach, California , was established in and still exists as a college preparatory boarding school.
Stevenson's former home in Vailima, Samoa , is now a museum dedicated to the later years of his life. The Robert Louis Stevenson Museum presents the house as it was at the time of his death along with two other buildings added to Stevenson's original one, tripling the museum in size. The path to Stevenson's grave at the top of Mount Vaea starts at the museum.
List of short stories sorted chronologically. Although not well known, his island fiction and non-fiction is among the most valuable and collected of the 19th century body of work that addresses the Pacific area. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects.
Robert louis stevenson author biography sample template
Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote Wikisource Wikidata item. For other people named Robert Stevenson, see Robert Stevenson disambiguation. Scottish novelist and poet — Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne. Family and education [ edit ]. Childhood and youth [ edit ]. Education [ edit ]. Holidays in Swanston [ edit ]. Lighthouse inspections [ edit ].
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Rejection of church dogma [ edit ]. Early writing and travels [ edit ]. Literary and artistic connections [ edit ]. Marriage [ edit ]. England, and back to the United States [ edit ]. Stevenson's house Skerryvore in the southern English coastal town of Bournemouth where he wrote the bulk of his most popular work. Commemorative plaque in Bournemouth, where Stevenson lived between and In , they arrived in the Samoan islands, where they decided to build a house and settle.
The island setting stimulated Stevenson's imagination, and, subsequently, influenced his writing during this time: Several of his later works are about the Pacific isles, including The Wrecker , Island Nights' Entertainments , The Ebb-Tide and In the South Seas Toward the end of his life, Stevenson's South Seas writing included more of the everyday world, and both his nonfiction and fiction became more powerful than his earlier works.
These more mature works not only brought Stevenson lasting fame, but they also helped to enhance his status with the literary establishment when his work was re-evaluated in the late 20th century, and his abilities were embraced by critics as much as his storytelling had always been by readers. Stevenson died of a stroke on December 3, , at his home in Vailima, Samoa.
He was buried at the top of Mount Vaea, overlooking the sea. We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! Nikki Giovanni. How Did Shakespeare Die? A Huge Shakespeare Mystery, Solved. Shakespeare Wrote 3 Tragedies in Turbulent Times.
The Mystery of Shakespeare's Life and Death. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The Master of Ballantrae. Robert Louis Stevenson enjoyed a successful literary life. His travel experiences, literary passions, and the early readings played a significant role in his entire career. He gained immense popularity on account of his thoughtful ideas and catchy writing techniques that inspired and spellbound generations.
The major elements of his style include the use of rhythm of the phrase , plain language, and communicative words. For instance, his much-appreciated work, Treasure Island , provides his readers with realistic and exciting adventures in a chatty and exotic style. His earliest works are descriptions of his journeys: An Inland Voyage , describing a canoe trip through Belgium and France in ; and Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes , an account of a journey on foot through mountains in southern France in Subsequent travels took him by immigrant ship and train to California , where in he married Frances Osbourne d.
He died in Samoa on Dec. Stevenson's popularity is based primarily on the exciting subject matter of his adventure novels and stories of the fantastic.