Other editions of book The Bottle Imp

Keawe is a Hawaiian who feels the need to know other lands, so he goes to San Francisco (United States). There he discovers a beautiful house whose owner seems somewhat sad and emaciated. When talking to him and asking him the reason for his sadness, the old man shows him a bottle of white glass in whose interior are all the colors of the rainbow. Amazed by his beauty, the old man tells him that in that bottle inhabits a demon capable of granting any desire, except one: to extend life to a person. For that, the owner of the bottle must meet a number of requirements: sell the bottle to another person before dying or go to hell, you can only sell the bottle if the price is lower than the owner paid.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), was a Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer, and a leading representative of Neo-romanticism in English literature. He was greatly admired by many authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling and Vladimir Nabokov. Most modernist writers dismissed him, however, because he was popular and did not write within their narrow definition of literature. It is only recently that critics have begun to look beyond Stevenson's popularity and allow him a place in the Western canon. Stevenson was a celebrity in his own time, but with the rise of modern literature after World War I, he was seen for much of the 20th century as a writer of the second class, relegated to children's literature and horror genres. His works include: An Inland Voyage (1878), Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1882), New Arabian Nights (1882), Kidnapped (1886), The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables (1887), Memories and Portraits (1887), Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin (1887), The Black Arrow (1888), and Master of Ballantrae: A Winter's Tale (1889).