There, the ailing author found my bones were sweeter to me. To the perplexity of his public in America and Europe, he decided to remain. His last six years were spent cruising the Pacific's myriad islands, making close friends of kings, princesses, islanders, traders and riffraff settlers, and making a home for his family on Upolu, Western Samoa. His romantic life and early death there have become one of the world's enduring literary legends. Albert Wendt, the Pacifics most respected living author, writes in his Foreword of the huge mythology of Stevenson's years in Samoa. Robert Louis Stevenson- His Best Pacific Writings shows that the books he wrote in response to that new challenge are among his very best. It collects for the first time a rich selection across the full range of forms he tried - fiction of violence, of romance and of magic, vivid travel writing, autobiography, history, instant-book journalism, poetry, ballads, fables, letters, speeches and prayers. It lets them speak for themselves, and it links them with an incisive and lively commentary. Above all, it illuminates a major writer's artistic struggle to craft a language and a style for the world's greatest unexplored subject. Robert Louis Stevenson- His Best Pacific Writings is a new kind of book. It provides much more of Stevenson's own writing than any conventional biography. It provides much more information and elucidation than any conventional 'selected works'. It includes material that has not been republished since the early 20th century. And shows Stevenson's Pacific writings to be important, richly entertaining, and central to understanding one of the world's most enjoyed authors. As Roger Robinson's commentary perceptively says, in our post-colonial era, they are ready to have their day.