Comprising The Amateur Emigrant: "From the Clyde to Sandy Hook" and "Across the Plains," The Silverado Squatters, and Four Essays on California
This volume contains in their entirety all of Stevenson's previously published and unpublished writings about his trip to California in 1879-1880. In defiance of family and friends, the 29-year-old Stevenson left Scotland on a 12,000-mile journey to be reunited with Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, the married American with whom he had fallen in love. The first part of The Amateur Emigrant vividly describes his Atlantic crossing, during which he was jammed into mean accommodations with a rich and variegated assortment of fellow passengers. The second part, previously published separately as Across the Plains, is a graphic account of his 11-day trek across the continent by emigrant train. The period in California, although one of anguish and sickness as he waited to be wed to Fanny, inspired several charmingly evocative essays on Monterey and San Francisco. Finally, The Silverado Squatters is a glowing account, redolent of romance, of his honeymoon in a deserted miners' cabin high on a California mountainside.
In a number of ways this book is a first edition of Stevenson. One essay, "Simoneau's at Monterey," has never been published before in any form; each of the other works contains new material discovered by the editor. The Amateur Emigrant as printed here is about a third longer than in previous editions, for the present editor has reinstated from manuscript all those passages that had been deleted by squeamish family and friends for fear of offending the public with their frank realism and marring the popular image of the author as a genteel romancer. The Silverado Squatters incorporates passages included in the first magazine version but never carried over into book form. Thus, each part of this volume offers an addition to the Stevenson canon.
James D. Hart is Chairman of the Department of English, University of California at Berkeley, and author of The Oxford Companion to American Literature. In his introduction, which is a substantial contribution to Stevenson scholarship, he makes clear the great influence of the California experience on Stevenson's later life and shows that it marked the beginning of his maturity as a writer. The introduction also includes the anonymous broadside "Padre Dos Reales," written by Stevenson in Monterey and here reprinted for the first time.
—from the dust jacket
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