Across the Plains

Robert Louis Stevenson crosses America by emigrant train in one of his sharpest and most revealing works of travel writing. Across the Plains follows Stevenson's 1879 journey from New York to California, a hard westward passage made in poor health, among immigrants, laborers, strangers, and fellow travelers packed into the rough conditions of nineteenth-century railway travel. What might have been a simple travel account becomes something richer: a record of landscape, discomfort, social observation, prejudice, endurance, and the restless promise of America.The full collection, Across the Plains, with Other Memories and Essays, brings together travel writing, memoir, literary reflection, and personal essays. Alongside the title account are pieces on Monterey, Fontainebleau, childhood memory, dreams, art, poverty, and moral imagination. Stevenson's prose is vivid, humane, ironic, and unsentimental, moving easily from physical detail to philosophical reflection. The book shows a different side of the author of Treasure Island and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: the essayist, traveler, observer, and craftsman of lived experience.First published in book form in 1892, Across the Plains stands as the middle section of Stevenson's American travel sequence, between The Amateur Emigrant and The Silverado Squatters. The title essay had earlier appeared in Longman's Magazine in 1883, under the fuller title "Across the Plains: Leaves from the Notebook of an Emigrant Between New York and San Francisco."