Author Dinner with English Speaking Union (Union Club of Boston)

The Union Club of Boston In Association With
The English-Speaking Union of Boston and The Oxford & Cambridge Society of New England
Present

Acclaimed Author Leo Damrosch speaking on his critically acclaimed bestselling biography
Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson

Wednesday, February 18, 2026, $95
The Union Club of Boston
6:00-9:30 P.M

Tickets cost $95 and include passed Hors d’oeuvres, and 3-course dinner with wine service. Please register by February 11th

The Union Club is accessible using the Park Street MBTA station Green and Red Lines. Parking is available at the Boston Common Garage, 0 Charles Street. The Garage is directly across the street from the Public Garden. Please use the pedestrian exit marked for “State House.”

“Damrosch is one of the preeminent literary biographers of our time, and this magnificent biography of Robert Louis Stevenson reveals much about a writer that we think we knew. . . Dazzling.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) is famed for Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but he published many other novels and stories before his death at forty-four. Despite lifelong ill health, he had immense vitality; Mark Twain said his eyes burned with “smoldering rich fire.” Born in Edinburgh to a family of lighthouse engineers, Stevenson set many stories in Scotland but sought travel and adventure in a life as romantic as his novels. “I loved a ship,” he wrote, “as a man loves burgundy or daybreak.” The adventures were shared with his free-spirited American wife, Fanny, with whom he moved to the South Pacific.

In Storyteller, Leo Damrosch brings to life an unforgettable personality, illuminated by many who knew Stevenson well and drawing from thousands of the writer’s letters in his many voices and moods—playful, imaginative, at times tragic.

Listed in the Wall Street Journal’s “The 10 Best Books of 2025,” and in the Christian Science Monitor’s “The Top 25 Books for 2025.”

Leo Damrosch is an American author and professor. In 2001, he was named the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard University. He received a B.A. from Yale University, a M.A. from Cambridge University, where he was a Marshall Scholar, and a Ph.D. from Princeton University. His areas of academic specialty include Romanticism, the Enlightenment, and Puritanism.