Myself and the Other Fellow

"The short life of Robert Louis Stevenson [1850-94] was as adventurous as almost anything in his fiction: his travels, illness, struggles to become a writer, relationships with his volatile wife and step-family, friendships, and quarrels have fascinated readers for more than a century. No biography has yet done justice to the complex, brilliant, and troubled man who was responsible for so many remarkable creations. His interest in psychology, genetics, technology, and feminism anticipated the concerns of the next century, while his experiments in narrative technique inspired postmodern innovators such as Borges and Nabokov. Stevenson's recently collected correspondence shows him to have been the least "Victorian" of Victorian writers; he was a man of humour, resilience, and strongly unconventional views. With access to this and much previously unpublished material, distinguished biographer Claire Harman has written the most authoritative, comprehensive, and perceptive portrait of Stevenson to date."--Jacket.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.