“Fiction
is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the
atmosphere and tenor of his life.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
Born on this day in 1850, Scottish
novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer Stevenson’s most famous and enduring
works are Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
and A Child's Garden of Verses.
The first stands up as one of the great adventure “thrillers” of all
time, and the latter as one of the most delightful ways to spend time with your
young child, enjoying the love of good rhyme and the great things about which
the rhymes are written.
Since writing my historical novel And The Wind Whispered, I’ve enjoyed
getting to know a fellow historical writer, Mark Wiederanders of Sacramento,
Calif., who has further brought the remarkable Stevenson back to life for
me. If you haven’t read Wiederanders’ Stevenson’s Treasure, I highly recommend
it to you. A really terrific book.
On this date of Stevenson’s birth, I
remember reading his insightful quote about writing: “The difficulty of literature is not to
write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him
precisely as you wish.” I would say that
he overcame the difficulty and affected us very well indeed.
A noted travel writer, Stevenson was
a great 
conversationalist and traveling companion. “Talk is by far the most accessible of
pleasures,” he noted. “It costs nothing
in money, it is all profit, it completes our education, founds and fosters our
friendships, and can be enjoyed at any age and in almost any state of
health. All speech, written or spoken,
is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.”
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