This fresh, compelling biography examines the extraordinary life and strange contrasts of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the struggling provincial doctor who became the most popular storyteller of his age. From his youthful exploits aboard a whaling ship to his often-stormy friendships with such figures as Harry Houdini and George Bernard Shaw, Conan Doyle lived a life as gripping as one of his adventures. Exhaustively researched and elegantly written, Daniel...

"Everyone knows Sherlock Holmes. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created a unique literary character who has remained popular for over a century and is appreciated more than ever today. But what made this fictional character, dreamed up by a small-town English doctor in the 1880s, into such a lasting success, despite the author's own attempt to escape his invention? In From Holmes to Sherlock, Swedish author and Sherlock Holmes expert Mattias Bostrom recreates...

This is a biography of Kenneth Grahame, author of the children's classic Wind in the Willows. What is little known, is that during his regular days, the author was the Secretary of the Bank of England. He and his wife, and their fragile son took to their country home for weekends, and relished the natural world that surrounded them there. This world was the basis for the Wind in the Willows, which has many layers of meaning: the delightful animal...

Describes the life of the man who wrote "Kidnapped," "Treasure Island," and "A Child's Garden of Verses."

Combines an account of Robert Louis Stevenson's experiences as he traveled from New York to California by train in 1879 and a description of the building and operation of railroads in nineteenth-century America.