Cordingly, David, The Black Flag, reprint, Harvest Books, 1997.

Cordingly looks pirates in the eye and discovers the truth of their lives, which is far from the romanticized versions in literature. The author also ponders the myths of pirates in an attempt to figure out where and how those myths were born.

Lapierre, Alexandra, Fanny Stevenson: A Romance of Destiny, Carroll & Graf, 1995.

Stevenson met Fanny, an American woman, in France and supposedly fell immediately in love with her, and she later became his wife. In the biography of Stevenson's wife, Lapierre exposes Fanny's emotions and her devotion to her husband, for whom she gave up her own creative endeavors as an artist.

McLynn, Frank, Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography, Random House, 1994.

McLynn believes that Stevenson was much more than a writer of boys' adventure stories. He sets out to demonstrate through this biography that Stevenson was...