Blue morocco grain cloth, gilt decoration with illustration of "Uma" & repeated on frontis, stylized block titles on the upper cover, floral decorated end-papers. Publisher's catalogue bound at the end dated 7G-4.93, First Edition, evidently 3rd state (prior dates 7G- 9.92 & 7G - 3.93). Owner bookplate on inside board, a bright near fine copy.
Three stories of the South Pacific dedicated to old shipmates among the Islands.These stories are set on the island of Samoa where Stevenson spent his last years. Included is The Beach of Falesa which is considered to be his finest story and which was originally censored by its British publisher.

Island Nights' Entertainments is a collection of short-stories by Robert Louis Stevenson published in 1893. Stevenson died young in 1894 so this is some of his last works but represents a signal change in his writing style that left some clue to where he was headed had he lived longer. Stevenson was best known and beloved for his Romantic works like Treasure Island, Jekyll and Hyde and Kidnapped. However when he decided to move to the worlds most romantic place, the South Seas, his work took a turn towards realism. Stevenson no doubt thought he was growing up and becoming a more "serious" writer, although some of his contemporary critics at the time thought his realist works were among his most forgettable and that it was a shame he didn't stick with what he was best known for. However what his critics could not see was that realism was soon to morph into modernism through the introduction of symbolism, and Stevenson was already beginning to experiment, at least a decade before Joseph Conrad. I have no doubt that had Stevenson lived he would have been known as a modernism pioneer, he was just on the cusp with stories like "The Beach of Falesa". This represents Stevenson's first realistic story, focused less on the plot than on the mannerisms of society. As Stevenson wrote in a letter to his friend back in England: "It is the first realistic South Seas story; I mean with real South Sea character and details of life. Everybody else that has tried, that I have seen, got carried away by the romance, and ended in a kind of sugar candy sham epic, and the whole effect was lost - there was not etching, no human grin, consequently no conviction. Now I have got the smell and look of the thing a good deal. You will know more about the South Seas after you have read my little tale than if you had read a library."

--Review by Stephen Balbach, via CoolReading (c) 2008 cc-by-nd ( )