America

Abstract

Long before his first trip to America in 1879, Stevenson had already come under the decisive influence of American literature through his discovery of Walt Whitman. In an autobiographical fragment composed in San Francisco early in 1880, Stevenson recalled that what had helped him to move on from his miserable ‘days of green-sickness’ as a young man in Edinburgh was ‘the study of Walt Whitman’ (B 84–6). As he put it in his essay on Whitman, Leaves of Grass was ‘a specific for the malady of being seventeen years old. Green-sickness yields to [Whitman’s] treatment as to a charm of magic.’ (T27 65) When the young Stevenson called a friend, whom he was ‘wading into’ with favourite Whitman passages, ‘a poor unbeliever’, he was only half-joking (L1 322–3). His discovery of Whitman (at the appropriate age of seventeen¹) had come with the force of a religious revelation. Leaves of Grass was, Stevenson later wrote in ‘Books Which Have Influenced Me’, ‘a book which tumbled the world upside down for me, blew into space a thousand cobwebs of genteel and ethical illusion, and, having thus shaken my tabernacle of lies, set me back on a strong foundation of all the original and manly virtues’ (T28 64).