ABSTRACT
On summer break from his university studies in 1868 and a few months before his eighteenth birthday. Robert Louis Stevenson worked late into the night. Stevenson was considered "the pattern of an idler," and his industrious vigils would have surprised those who knew him. When Stevenson did suffer an early death, 26 years later at 44 and a world away in Samoa, his contemporaries debated whether he would be best remembered for his fiction or essays. Stevenson wrote more than 100 essays in his lifetime, and while they range from biographical portraits and political arguments to travel narratives and lite ran criticism, most of them are best described as personal: informal, intimate essays that attempt to reveal the writer through dramatized thought and experience. Stevenson himself insisted on the link between literature and life in his essays. In addition to "the mechanical side of his trade." he wrote, the artist must learn the "Art of Living".
