Dreams of Elsewhere: Selected Travel Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson

Best known for his fiction writing, Robert Louis Stevenson was also an essayist, journalist, poet and travel writer. His first major work was An Inlan d Voyage, an account of his journey by canoe from Antwerp to northern France. The companion work to this, Travels with a Donkey in the C vennes (1879), is widely regarded as a travel-writing classic. Skinner Sawyers has brought together the most comprehensive and representative sampling of Robert Louis Stevenson’s prolific travel output, including excerpts from his most famous travel books, travel essays and travel poetry. The result is a collection that is as vivid and compelling as his fiction, with a number of previously unpublished works from US collections. There are endlessly fascinating portraits of flesh-and-blood human beings, and it becomes apparent that he never grew tired of meeting new people, or of seeking new adventures. The story-teller always finds stories to tell and Stevenson was a consummate storyteller.In the tranquility of a French pine forest by moonlight he considers the importance of friendship; in a leper colony on Hawaii he reflects on physical horror and moral beauty; in all of his writing there is humanity and compasssion.

Reviews of Dreams of Elsewhere: Selected Travel Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson

'Sawyers has chosen well. There are many examples of gilded prose in this collection… He gives a compelling sense of a country, America, creating itself with feverish haste.' The Herald 'A fascinating Volume.' The Highland News