The Complete Stories of Robert Louis Stevenson

Frontispiece from Katharine D. Osbourne’s
Robert Louis Stevenson in California (CHICAGO, 1911).

2002 Modern Library Paperback Edition

“Stevenson in the OED” and revisions to the Introduction and Notes copyright © 2002 by Barry Menikoff
Biographical note copyright © 2001 by Random House, Inc.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Northwestern University Press for permission to revise and expand the Introduction and Notes and reprint the glossary, all by Barry Menikoff, from Tales from the Prince of Storytellers (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993). Copyright © 1993 by Northwestern University Press. Used by permission of Northwestern University Press.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Oxford University Press for permission to reprint selected excerpts from definitions quoting Robert Louis Stevenson from The Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition, 1989). Copyright © 1989 by Oxford University Press. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 1850–1894.
 [Short stories]
The complete stories of Robert Louis Stevenson: Strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and nineteen other tales / edited, with an introduction and notes, by Barry Menikoff.—Modern Library pbk. ed.
p. cm.—(Modern Library classics)
eISBN: 978-0-307-79684-4
I. Menikoff, Barry. II. Title. III. Series.

PR5481 .M46 2002       823′.8—dc21       2002066022

Modern Library website address: www.BookishMall.com

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ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

Robert Louis Stevenson, a versatile and prolific writer best remembered for his novels of romantic adventure, was born in Edinburgh on 13 November 1850. The son of a prosperous civil engineer who specialized in the construction of lighthouses, he was expected to follow the family profession but ended up studying law at Edinburgh University. Still, when he was a young man his agnosticism and bohemian existence led to painful clashes with his strict Calvinist parents. Stevenson spent much of his life battling a severe lung disease (probably tuberculosis) and traveled constantly in search of a climate that would prove congenial to his health. His first full-length book, An Inland Voyage (1878), grew out of a canoe trip he took through Belgium and northern France; a later tour through the wilds of southern France produced Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879). Stevenson journeyed to San Francisco in 1879 to marry Fanny Osbourne, an American divorcée ten years his senior. The Silverado Squatters (1883) recalls the couple’s eccentric honeymoon at an abandoned silver mine on Mount Saint Helena. After returning to Europe in 1880 the Stevensons moved about, living in Switzerland, France, and England.

“Fiction is to grown men what play is to the child,” Stevenson once said. He launched his career as a storyteller with “A Lodging for the Night” (1877), a short story set in fifteenth-century Paris that recounts an episode in the life of French poet François Villon. He went on to write ghost stories, medieval romances, moral allegories, tales of psychological horror, and fables drawn from Scottish folklore. In 1882 he brought out New Arabian Nights, an extravagant series of adventures that pays tribute to one of the favorite books of his childhood. G. K. Chesterton remarked, “I will not say that the New Arabian Nights is the greatest of Stevenson’s works; though a considerable case might be made for the challenge. But I will say that it is probably the most unique; there was nothing like it before, and, I think, nothing equal to it since.” Stevenson’s other compilations of short fiction include More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter (1885) and The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables (1887).