Reporting from Calistoga, Calif. — In the summer of 1879, an obscure Scottish author set out for California in pursuit of a married woman 10 years his senior. The three-week journey nearly killed him.

I am sorry to say I haven’t read anything by Robert Louis Stevenson (RLS to scholars, Louis to his friends), but I’ve come close by reading Brian Doyle’s The Adventures of John Carson in Several ...

Reading recommendations from critics and editors at The New York Times. Leo Damrosch traces the life of an imperialist turned anti-imperialist who wrote several exceptional books and one ...

Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van de Grift should never have been together, but as Camille Peri writes in “A Wilder Shore: The Romantic Odyssey of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson” (Viking), their ...

Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Kidnapped” appeared in 1886, the same year as “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and just three years after “Treasure Island.” According to the Oxford Companion to ...

Purchase this and other timeless New Criterion essays in our hard-copy reprint series. Stevenson’s was one of those large, flowing talents of the kind that always seem to leave lots of spillage in the ...

The gleaming white skin and hairless head. The emaciated body carried out on a stretcher. The worshipful natives on every side, fulfilling even the most capricious commands. The almost spectral ...

Good morning. Robert Louis Stevenson’s short time in Bournemouth, where he developed an epistolary friendship with Henry James, was one of the most productive periods of his life. Andrew O’Hagan tells ...