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Informationen zum Autor Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850. The son of a prosperous civil engineer, he was expected to follow the family profession but was finally allowed to study law at Edinburgh University. Stevenson reacted forcibly against the Presbyterianism of both his city's professional classes and his devout parents, but the influence of Calvinism on his childhood informed the fascination with evil that is so powerfully explored in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde . Stevenson suffered from a severe respiratory disease from his twenties onwards, leading him to settle in the gentle climate of Samoa with his American wife, Fanny Osbourne. Klappentext Young David Balfour, left in poverty when his father dies, goes to his uncle, Ebenezer, for assistance. He soon finds himself kidnapped and on board a ship, headed for a life of slavery. With the help of daring rebel Alan Breck, David escapes, only to get mixed up in a desperate adventure - suspected of murder and hunted across the Scottish moors. Introduction by Margot Livesey I. When I was growing up in Scotland, Robert Louis Stevenson was the first author whom I knew by name, and he remains the only one whom I can truthfully claim to have been reading all my life. From an early age, my parents read to me from A Child´s Garden of Verses , and I soon learned some of the poems by heart. I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me, And what can be the use of him is more than I can see. Perhaps I recognized, even then, Stevenson´s unique gift for keeping a foot in two camps. While the poems vividly captured my childish concerns, somewhere in the margins shimmered the mystery of adult life. A few years later Kidnapped was the first chapter book I read, and I can still picture the maroon binding and the black-and-white drawings that illustrated David Balfour´s adventures. At the age of seven, a book without pictures would have been out of the question, but, in fact, they turned out to be superfluous. I could imagine everything that happened just from the words on the page, although I must admit to the small advantage that the view from my bedroom window--bare hills, rocks, heather--was very much like the landscape of Kidnapped . At first glance such early acquaintance might seem like a good omen for an author´s reputation. In actuality, that Stevenson is so widely read by children has tended to make him seem like an author from who, as adults, we have little to learn. It is worth noting that his contemporaries would not have shared this prejudice. Nineteenth-century readers did not regard children´s books as separate species. Stevenson´s own father often reread The Parent´s Assistant, a volume of children´s stories, and Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf´s father, writes of staying up late to finish Treasure Island . Like the shadow of his poem, Stevenson´s reputation has waxed and waned at an alarming rate. He died in a blaze of hagiography, which perhaps in part explains the fury of later critics. F.R. Leavis in The Great Tradition dismisses Stevenson (in a footnote, no less) as a romantic writer, guilty of fine writing, and in general Stevenson has not fared as well as his friend Henry James. People comment with amazement that Borges and Nabokov praised his novels. Still, his best work has remained in print for over a hundred years, and his is among that small group of authors to have given a phrase to the language: Jekyll and Hyde. Besides our perception of Stevenson as a children´s author, two other factors may have contributed to his ambiguous reputation. Although his list of publications is much longer than most people realize--he wrote journalism and travel pieces for money--he failed to produce a recognizable oeuvre, a group of works that stand together, each resonating with the others. In addition, th...
