… the picture I seem to be limning of a sickly child with a febrile imagination set aflame by religious fantasies, a boy so crushable that he therefore must easily be crushed, is a distortion. He may have been ill but he wasn’t unhappy; his illness merely forced him to live more in his mind than other children, devising games to be played upon the counterpane, inventing stories to pass the secluded days. The future author of Treasure Island and Kidnapped was already working at his apprenticeship. He had powerful inner resources—and powerful outer ones, too. Boy and man, Robert Louis Stevenson was one tough and willful hombre. So far as one can make out, he never finally did anything in life that he really didn’t want to do.
For those of us who started reading Stevenson as children, he is more than a writer. He is a friend.
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