Robert Louis Stevenson’s first major biographer, J. C. Furnas, recalled the mildly patronizing comments his project occasioned: “‘How interesting that you are doing a life of Stevenson! I hadn’t thought of him since my children read him,’ as if the subject were Beatrix Potter.” While reviewing Storyteller, Leo Damrosch’s “life” of Stevenson, I experienced something similar, the few I mentioned it to supposing I must be writing for the once and future enjoyment of my two sons. (There is some truth in this.)
That Stevenson remains so narrowly identified with “boys’ stories” says as much about his firm grip on the young as it does the character of his narrative genius. Yet, as Damrosch notes, his admirers range from Mark Twain to Italo Calvino. According to Marcel Proust’s Swann, he was “tout à fait a great writer … equal to the very greatest.” G. K. Chesterton perhaps captured Stevenson’s lean style best: “He hated dilution and loved to take language neat, like a liqueur.”
