NOVEMBER 10 — NOVEMBER 16
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Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island is first published as a single volume. |
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Robert Louis Stevenson’s adventure classic Treasure Island first appeared in October 1881—or rather, it began to appear, in serialized form in the magazine Young Folks (as The Sea Cook: A Story for Boys, and under the pseudonym “Captain George North”), despite the fact that it wasn’t actually finished yet. On a whim, trapped inside during the bad weather of a Scottish summer, Stevenson started telling his 12-year-old stepson a story about a secret treasure map, and then decided to write it down.
It was a friend, Alexander Japp, who connected Stevenson to the editor of Young Folks, but it wasn’t an easy road. Stevenson had never written a novel before, and he was in poor health, as he had been most of his life—in the middle of the serialization, he moved from Scotland to Switzerland, always in search of the climate that would cure him. But he kept writing, and finished the serialized version of the story in January 1882.
The story was purchased for 100 pounds by a publishing house, Cassell & Co, in the spring of 1883, and after some revisions, was published for the first time as a standalone volume on November 14, 1883. No one would soon forget it. Treasure Island—along with the many many adaptations, but especially the 1950 film version—has heavily influenced our pop cultural idea of “the pirate,” arguably more so than any other text or source. Stevenson’s story has a treasure map marked with a big red X, buried treasure, tropical islands, a pirate with a peg leg and a parrot on his shoulder. Heck, he even invented “Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!” Where would children’s Halloween costumes be without him?
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MORE WHERE THAT CAME FROM
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“The book, the statue, the sonata, must be gone upon with the unreasoning good faith and the unflagging spirit of children at their play. IS IT WORTH DOING?—when it shall have occurred to any artist to ask himself that question, it is implicitly answered in the negative. It does not occur to the child as he plays at being a pirate on the dining-room sofa, nor to the hunter as he pursues his quarry; and the candour of the one and the ardour of the other should be united in the bosom of the artist.”
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In other (old) news this week |
After 22 rejections, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 is finally published (November 10, 1961) • The first installment of original literary softboi Hans Christian Andersen’s New Fairy Tales, including "The Ugly Duckling,” is published in Denmark (November 11, 1843) • 21st century influencer James Baldwin boards a plane to Paris with $40 in his pocket. (November 11, 1948) • Marcel Proust's delightful and confounding Swann's Way (Du côté de chez Swann), the first volume of In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu), is published in Paris at the author's expense (November 13, 1913) • Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is published in the United States (November 14, 1851) • Newspaper reporter Nellie Bly sets out from New York to travel around the world in 80 days (November 14th, 1889) • Fyodor Dostoevsky is sentenced to death for plotting against the Russian state (November 16, 1849).
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“A child, alone with his book, creates for himself, somewhere in the secret recesses of the soul, his own pictures which surpass all else. Such pictures are necessary for humanity. On the day that the children’s imagination no longer has the strength to create them, on that day humanity will be poorer. All great things that have happened in the world, happened first of all in someone’s imagination, and the aspect of the world of tomorrow depends largely on the extent of the power of imagination in those who are just now learning to read. This is why children must have books.”
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“If technique is of no interest to a writer, I doubt that the writer is an artist.” |
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