Essays on the Art of Writing and Fables

ESSAYS ON THE ART OF WRITING collects seven important essays on authorship, including "On Some Technical Elements of Style" and "The Morality of the Profession of Letters," as well as Robert Louis Stevenson's accounts of writing Treasure Island and The Master of Ballantrae. Written more than a century ago, these essays are full of insight for today's readers and brimming with still-applicable wisdom for modern writers. Stevenson's collection of twenty FABLES has little to do with conventional lessons of right and wrong. His allegorical parables offer, instead, what the author called "tail foremost moralities." Stevenson slices through societal façades of hypocrisy, bigotry, and stupidity with sardonic wit more akin to Monty Python than Aesop. Some of the darker tales may remind one of the works of Edgar Allan Poe or Ambrose Bierce. Odd and evocative, amusing and thought provoking, Stevenson's fables might prove more appropriate for our day and age than his own. A posthumous collection, Essays in the Art of Writing (also known as The Art of Writing and Other Essays), gathered some of Stevenson's important essays on authorship. It was first published in 1905 by Chatto and Windus. The collected Fables was also a postumous publication. Stevenson proposed a book of fables to publisher Longmans, Green and Co. in the spring of 1888, but never presented the publisher with a manuscript. After his death in 1894, the fables he had written were published by Longmans in its magazine (1895). The following year, they were included in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with Other Fables, a new edition of his famous 1886 novella. The fables were first published separately in 1902 by Longmans, Green and Co. in an illustrated edition with six etchings by Ethel King Martyn. Although both collections have been reprinted in several forms, this is the first time the two have been combined in a one-volume edition.