Robert Louis Stevenson

"Robert Louis Stevenson loved to conjure up a dashing, romantic lineage for himself, dreaming that he was descended from the colourful outlaw Rob Roy MacGregor. The reality was less flamboyant but no less remarkable, and he would learn that the street lamps of Edinburgh owed their brilliance to the scientific work of his own great-grandfather." "This welcome addition to the Robert Louis Stevenson canon gives a concise account of his life - his family background, childhood and adolescence in a Calvinist, hard-working household in Scotland, his travels in three continents, and his final years in the South Seas. It examines his relationships with his parents and his nurse, with English and American friends, particularly the family into which he married, and with the Samoan islanders among whom he died at the age of 44."--BOOK JACKET.