"Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes" is one of Robert Louis Stevenson's earliest published works and is considered a pioneering classic of outdoor literature. The book recounts Stevenson's 12-day, 200-kilometer (120 mi) solo hiking journey through the sparsely populated and impoverished areas of the Cevennes mountains in south-central France in 1878. The writer took up the journey to distance himself from a love affair with an American woman of which his friends and families did not approve and who had returned to her husband in California.