At the time of his death in Samoa in 1894, Robert Louis Stevenson was regarded by many critics and a large reading public as the most important writer in the English-speaking world. "Surely another age will wonder over this curiosity of letters," wrote Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch at the time, "that for five years the needle of literary endeavor in Great Britain has quivered toward a little island in the South Pacific, as to its magnetic pole." Critics as demanding as Henry James and Gerard Manley Hopkins agreed on Stevenson's importance, a fact difficult to imagine today when his critical stature is so much more modest. While Stevenson's short fiction is an important part of his achievement, his output was fairly small because he spent most of his brief life working in other literary genres. Beginning primarily as an essayist and travel writer, he soon moved on to short fiction...