Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson

Damrosch's case for Stevenson rests on pulling him out from under the shadow of Treasure Island and Jekyll and Hyde to show a writer whose late Pacific work—travelogues and fiction written after he settled in Samoa and became an advocate against colonial administration there—deserves equal standing. The biography leans heavily on Stevenson's marriage to Fanny Osbourne and her sister Nellie, using their letters to argue that his domestic and creative lives were inseparable, and treats landscape, the physical places he moved through while chronically ill, as a structuring force on his imagination rather than mere backdrop. It's a defense of range over a single classic, more interested in reassessing a career than retelling an already-familiar life.