Publisher's Synopsis
Containing 40 essays and more than 20 fragments from before the time Treasure Island made Stevenson famous as a fiction writer, the collection demonstrates that essay writing was a deliberate choice of Stevenson's literary apprenticeship even though many early pieces were not collected in his lifetime. The volume contains a cornucopia of brilliant texts: walking tour and landscape essays; University magazine pieces; immediately-impressive early essays in literary magazines; book reviews; notes on bohemian life in Paris and artists' colonies; non-dogmatic ethical writings and his first essays on the art of literature. They are a fascinating trace of the thoughts of a young man devoted to writing in the university, bohemian and literary-London worlds of the 1870s.
