Leo Damrosch Storyteller The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson review, recensie en informatie biografie van de Schotse schrijver. Op 2 september 2025 verschijnt bij Yale University Press de biografie van Robert Louis Stevenson, geschreven door Leo Damrosch. Een Nederlandse vertaling van het boek is niet verkrijgbaar.
Leo Damrosch Storyteller The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson review en recensie
- “Damrosch brings to Stevenson’s life the calm, humane interpretive powers that he deployed with such success in The Club … Stevenson was a master of sensory clarity, [and] learning how he achieved his ‘kinetic’ effects is one of the great pleasures of this excellent book.” (Meghan Cox Gurdon, Wall Street Journal)
- “In this biography told as an adventure story, Leo Damrosch convincingly portrays R. L. Stevenson as one of the most endearing writers in the English language.” (Alberto Manguel, author)
- “This will now stand as the standard modern life of Robert Louis Stevenson, its scholarly authority enhanced by its readability. The events of Stevenson’s extraordinary life are narrated with verve, and RLS himself is brought vividly before us, his complexity and charisma conveyed without any note of hagiography (or, conversely, critical debunking).” (Ian Duncan, University of California)
- “Is there a better biographer alive today than Leo Damrosch? His latest, a full-scale biography of Robert Louis Stevenson, is a brilliant storytelling achievement worthy of both its title and the redoubtable subject at its center. Stevenson lived more in his forty-four years than most do in a lifetime.” (Morten Høi Jensen)
Storyteller
The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson
- Auteur: Leo Damrosch (Verenigde Staten)
- Soort boek: biografie
- Taal: Engels
- Uitgever: Yale University Press
- Verschijnt: 2 september 2025
- Omvang: 584 pagina’s
- Uitgave: gebonden boek / ebook
- Prijs $ 35,00
- Boek bestellen bij: Amazon / Bol / Libris
Flaptekst van de biografie van de Schotse schrijver Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) is famed for Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but he published many other novels and stories before his death at forty-four. Despite lifelong ill health, he had immense vitality; Mark Twain said his eyes burned with “smoldering rich fire.” Born in Edinburgh to a family of lighthouse engineers, Stevenson set many stories in Scotland but sought travel and adventure in a life as romantic as his novels. “I loved a ship,” he wrote, “as a man loves burgundy or daybreak.” The adventures were shared with his free-spirited American wife, Fanny, with whom he moved to the South Pacific.
Samoan friends named Stevenson “Storyteller.” Reading, he said, “should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves.” His own books have been translated into dozens of languages. Jorge Luis Borges called his stories “one of the forms of happiness,” and other modernist masters as various as Proust, Nabokov, and Calvino have paid tribute to his greatness as a literary artist.
In Storyteller, Leo Damrosch brings to life an unforgettable personality, illuminated by many who knew Stevenson well and drawing from thousands of the writer’s letters in his many voices and moods—playful, imaginative, at times tragic.
Leo Damrosch is the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature Emeritus at Harvard University. His many books include Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (National Book Award finalist); Adventurer: The Life and Times of Giacomo Casanova, The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age and Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World (National Book Critics Circle Award winner, Pulitzer Prize finalist). He lives in Newton, MA.