Across the Plains by Robert Louis Stevenson

Description

Stevenson crosses America — by emigrant train. In Across the Plains, Robert Louis Stevenson recounts his 1879 journey from Scotland to California: steerage across the Atlantic, then the emigrant train across the American plains — all to reach Fanny Osbourne, the married American woman he loved, in Monterey.

Written with Stevenson’s matchless eye and ear, these essays capture the immigrant experience from the inside: the crowded, sooty cars, the vast and indifferent landscapes, the fellow travelers — Chinese laborers, Dutch families, fellow dreamers — and the romance that drove a sickly young writer to risk everything, including his fragile health, for love. Every page glows with the young author’s curiosity and his novelist’s gift for character.

Travel writing of the highest order and a love story to boot — essential Stevenson, and one of the great American journey narratives: the West as seen by an outsider who saw it completely fresh, and wrote it down unforgettably.

Long before he gave the world Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson was a young writer with an empty wallet and a full heart, crossing an ocean for love. Across the Plains, with Other Memories and Essays, published in 1892, is the middle volume of his great American travel memoir — and one of the finest travel books of the nineteenth century.

The title essay recounts Stevenson’s 1879 emigrant-train journey from New York to San Francisco, traveled in third class among hundreds of European immigrants. With his trademark wit and humanity, he captures the cramped cars, the eccentric fellow travelers, and the vast, unfolding landscape of a country still inventing itself. Around it, eleven more stories and essays roam from Monterey to Fontainebleau, blending memory, observation, and reflection.

Written with the storyteller’s flair that made Kidnapped and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde immortal, these pieces reveal Stevenson the essayist at his best: curious, compassionate, and endlessly quotable.

For lovers of travel writing, classic literature, and the American West, Across the Plains is a small treasure — a journey you will want to take again and again.