Familiar Studies of Men and Books
Book Author Robert Louis Stevenson
DescriptionFamiliar Studies of Men and Books (1882) provided a kind of companion-piece to Virginibus Puerisque, reprinting the more literary and critical essays left out of the first collection. In his Preface, RLS describes the contents as "the readings of a literary vagrant".
The volume contains nine essays: seven essays previously appearing in the Cornhill Magazine ("Victor Hugo's Romances" [1874]; "Charles of Orleans" [1876]; "François Villon, Student, Poet, and Housebreaker" [1877]; "Some Aspects of Robert Burns" [1879]; "Henry David Thoreau: His Character and Opinions" and "Yoshida-Torajiro" [1880]; "Samuel Pepys" [1881]), one from Macmillan's ("John Knox and His Relations to Women" [1875]) and one from New Quarterly Magazine ("Walt Whitman", 1878). Stevenson added a "Preface, by Way of Criticism", offering his own assessment of his essays, often showing the way his views changed since the essays had been first written.