You might know Robert Louis Stevenson best as the author of “Treasure Island” but before his death, he was better known for his essays. Many of those essays his editor changed without Stevenson’s authorization.
BYU-Idaho English professor Dr. Trenton Olsen decided to compile the authentic, authorized essays into one book, “The Complete Personal Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson.”
Olsen was an avid reader of Stevenson and was surprised when he realized a compilation of the author’s essays had not yet been created.
“I went to order the book and it didn’t exist. And that’s how this came about, me working to bring about the book that I wanted to read that wasn’t available,” Olsen said.
Olsen said the author not only wrote interesting literature but had an interesting life as well.
For example, Stevenson earned a law degree from the University of Edinburgh but was not interested in pursuing law as a career. He instead devoted his life to writing.
The author, who only lived to be 44 years old, lived in Scotland, England, France, Switzerland, New York, California, Hawaii and Samoa over the course of his life.
“A lot of these essays are sort of memoir essays about his own experiences. And so, we find him in these essays canoeing across France and Belgium [and] taking a 120-mile backpacking trip through a French mountain range with a very stubborn donkey. He was once arrested on suspicion of being a German spy,” Olsen said.
The professor is hosting an event called “Facing Death and Embracing Life with Robert Louis Stevenson” on Thursday, where he will tell the rest of the story of Stevenson’s life. The event starts at 7 p.m., which will be at the Ricks Building room 147 on the BYU-Idaho campus.
To purchase a copy of Dr. Olsen’s book, visit Barnes & Noble.