|
|
Robert Louis Stevenson
|
New York, March 14 (AP): Robert Louis Stevenson is the author of Treasure Island and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, some of the most thrilling stories in literary history. But in a newly discovered essay, he says he was often bored by the fiction of his day.
“In the trash that I have no doubt you generally read, a vast number of people will probably get shot and stabbed and drowned; and you have only a very slight excitement for your money,” Stevenson wrote.
“But if you want to know what a murder really is — to have a murder brought right home to you — you must read of one in the writings of a great writer. Read Macbeth, for example, or still better, get someone to read it aloud to you; and I think I can promise you what people call a ‘sensation.’”
Stevenson’s criticisms appear in a brief, long-lost essay published in The Strand Magazine, a quarterly based in Birmingham, Michigan, that has published obscure texts by Mark Twain, Graham Greene and other famous authors.
Apparently part of a larger work, the piece is titled Books and Reading. No 2. How books have to be written. The Strand managing editor Andrew Gulli said that essay “No. 1” was auctioned off in 1914, 20 years after the author’s death, and never seen again. No. 2 turned up recently at a location very far from Stevenson’s native Scotland.
|
