The Mountains of Instead

  Robert Louis Stevenson and the Dilemma of an Uncritical Readership   It was the intention of the organizers of this centenary festival to invite both Stevenson scholars and non-specialists whose work has led them to be interested in Stevenson.   I am not a scholar, of Stevenson or any other topic; but certainly it is my work that has led me to be interested in Stevenson. My interest is not nostalgic or bound up with the private pleasures of youthful reading, because I didn’t read Stevenson when I was young. I knew verses from A Child’s Garden . I saw and was deeply affected by the Disney version of Treasure Island with Robert Newton. But what I read was Gods, Graves and Scholars , and Kon-Tiki , and Sons of Sinbad , and Lowell Thomas in Tibet. In adventure stories, I preferred fact to fiction. I still do.             I began to read Stevenson as a grown-up, for professional reasons. I needed to learn how to write a story. It amazed me, beginning seriously to write long fiction