Across the Plains

By Robert Louis Stevenson

“…one child, who had lost her parents, screamed steadily and with increasing shrillness, as though verging towards a fit; an official kept her by him, but no one else seemed so much as to remark her distress; and I am ashamed to say that I ran among the rest”. Across the plains describes Stevenson's arrival at New York as an immigrant, along with hundreds of other Europeans, and his train journey from New York to San Francisco in an immigrant train. Stevenson describes the train as having three sections: one for women and children, one for men, and one for Chinese. He notes that while the Europeans looked down on the Chinese for being dirty, in fact the Chinese carriages were the freshest and their passengers the cleanest.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 9, 2013
• ISBN: 9781291348798

Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850, the only son of an engineer, Thomas Stevenson. Despite a lifetime of poor health, Stevenson was a keen traveller, and his first book An Inland Voyage (1878) recounted a canoe tour of France and Belgium. In 1880, he married an American divorcee, Fanny Osbourne, and there followed Stevenson's most productive period, in which he wrote, amongst other books, Treasure Island (1883), The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Kidnapped (both 1886). In 1888, Stevenson left Britain in search of a more salubrious climate, settling in Samoa, where he died in 1894.

Reviews for Across the Plains

[quaintlittlehead · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book is actually a collection of non-fiction writings by Robert Louis Stevenson, only a portion of which deal with his journey by train across the American continent. Other chapters detail his memories of Scotland, a brief "Christmas Sermon" on morality, and, my favourite, an exceptionally good "Letter to a Young Gentleman Who Proposes to Embrace the Career of Art." There is not really a common thread between the chapters other than Stevenson's flair for descriptive writing, but what a flair it is. Discovering the origins of "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" in a particularly vivid dream of the author's was alone worth the price of admission. While the book seems a bit piecemeal read as a whole, it is a nice supplement to the outstanding literary output of one of our great authors.