Across the Plains - Robert Louis Stevenson

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Résumé :
Robert Louis Stevenson crosses America by emigrant train in one of his sharpest and most revealing works of travel writing. Across the Plains follows Stevenson's 1879 journey from New York to California, a hard westward passage made in poor health, among immigrants, laborers, strangers, and fellow travelers packed into the rough conditions of nineteenth-century railway travel. What might have been a simple travel account becomes something richer: a record of landscape, discomfort, social observation, prejudice, endurance, and the restless promise of America. The full collection, Across the Plains, with Other Memories and Essays, brings together travel writing, memoir, literary reflection, and personal essays. Alongside the title account are pieces on Monterey, Fontainebleau, childhood memory, dreams, art, poverty, and moral imagination. Stevenson's prose is vivid, humane, ironic, and unsentimental, moving easily from physical detail to philosophical reflection. The book shows a different side of the author of Treasure Island and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: the essayist, traveler, observer, and craftsman of lived experience. First published in book form in 1892, Across the Plains stands as the middle section of Stevenson's American travel sequence, between The Amateur Emigrant and The Silverado Squatters. The title essay had earlier appeared in Longman's Magazine in 1883, under the fuller title Across the Plains: Leaves from the Notebook of an Emigrant Between New York and San Francisco....

Biographie:
Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, essayist, poet, and travel writer whose work helped shape adventure fiction, psychological horror, children's literature, and modern literary romance. Born in Edinburgh in 1850, Stevenson was expected to follow his family into lighthouse engineering, but ill health, travel, and literary ambition drew him toward writing. His life was marked by movement: Scotland, France, the United States, the South Seas, and finally Samoa, where he spent his last years.Stevenson's best-known books include Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, A Child's Garden of Verses, The Master of Ballantrae, The Silverado Squatters, and Across the Plains. His work combines narrative speed, moral complexity, elegance of style, and a deep sympathy for people under pressure. Whether writing pirate adventure, Gothic nightmare, travel memoir, or reflective essay, Stevenson remains one of the great prose stylists of the nineteenth century....

Sommaire:
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) was a Scottish novelist, essayist, poet, travel writer, and one of the most widely read authors of the late nineteenth century. Born in Edinburgh into a family of lighthouse engineers, Stevenson was expected to follow the family profession but turned instead toward literature, despite chronic ill health that shaped much of his life and travel. He studied law, wrote essays and travel sketches, and developed a literary voice marked by clarity, movement, atmosphere, and a strong sense of moral and imaginative adventure.Stevenson achieved lasting fame with works that range across adventure fiction, Gothic horror, historical romance, children's literature, poetry, and personal essays. His best-known books include Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, A Child's Garden of Verses, The Master of Ballantrae, and Travels with a Donkey in the C?vennes. He had a gift for creating stories that are both immediately readable and morally resonant, combining suspense, vivid setting, memorable characters, and deeper questions about courage, loyalty, identity, guilt, and the divided nature of the self.In his later years, Stevenson traveled widely in search of better health, eventually settling in Samoa, where he became involved in local political concerns and was known affectionately as Tusitala, teller of tales. His influence extends across popular fiction and literary fiction alike: pirate stories, adventure novels, psychological horror, and tales of moral doubling all owe something to his example. More than a century after his death, Stevenson remains a central figure in English-language literature, read by children and adults for his storytelling power, stylistic elegance, and ability to turn adventure and terror into lasting myth....