“IF NOBODY WRITES TO ME I SHALL DIE,” warned Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94) in an uncharacteristically overwrought letter to a friend in 1884. The threat wasn’t quite idle, for the next day he almost did—not in a fit of epistolary loneliness, of course, but from a severe tubercular hemorrhage. And yet correspondence assumed for Stevenson, especially during the last years of his curtailed life, a singular importance. While this Scotsman’s twenty-eight hundred letters hardly hold the record, I doubt that anyone has topped Stevenson for sheer relish of the medium. All the brisk élan of his novels and essays animates his letters, too. Better still, they make us acquainted, as nothing else can, with the complex, delightful, and— rarest of qualities—wholly admirable character that was R.L.S., as it pleased Stevenson to sign himself.

Thanks to the efforts of Ernest Mehew, it’s now possible to get the full flavor of Stevenson’s piquant letters in a single meaty volume.[1] Spanning the years from September 1868, when R.L.S.was seventeen, right up to a few days before his death in 1894, the 317 letters chosen by Mehew range across the broad spectrum of moods, from the goofball to the saturnine, in which Stevenson operated. No less diverse is the roster of his recipients: Stevenson’s parents, cousin, oldest friends, and adored ex-nurse, Cummy, at the homier end of the list, and, at the more glamorous pole, a group of luminaries that includes Twain, Yeats, Rodin, Hardy, Henry James, J.