Everyone has their own RLS - the sickly, dreaming child; the bohemian dandy outraging Victorian Edinburgh; the romantic wanderer trailing his donkey over the Cevennes; the frail genius doomed to die young; the man of action avid for experience in all corners of the globe; the writer of children's stories familiar from a thousand television and film dramas; the essayist who matched Hazlitt and the novelist to whom even Henry James deferred. All of these are RLS: none of them are the real Stevenson. This book is an attempt to see RLS whole, to trace the line of descent from the son of the Calvinist engineers to the writer who stood against the British Empire for the sake of the Samoan islanders. It is an attempt to discover the complete RLS through the places he lived and the people he lived among, from France to the South Seas, and in the books which poured from him in his short life. Part literary biography, part travel writing, the book traces Stevenson's development as an artist and as man by following his often chaotic progress from continent to continent, in good health and bad, in poverty and wealth. It unravels his often tortured relations with his family, his robust sexuality and the mystery of his stormy marriage to a woman years his senior. This book also places Stevenson in the Scotland of his day. It explains him in terms of the Scottish traditions of emigration, exile and escape, and of the society which made such a course necessary to him. Finally, it suggests that the real Stevenson has been all but lost among the many conflicting - and often romanticised - images we have of him, and that his fame as a story teller has obscured his genius as a writer.