The Bottle Imp
1891 short story by Robert Louis Stevenson
"The Bottle Imp" is an 1891 short story by the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson usually found in the short story collection Island Nights' Entertainments. It was first published in the New York Herald (February–March 1891) and Black and White magazine (London, March–April 1891). In it, the protagonist buys a bottle with an imp inside that grants wishes. However, the bottle is cursed; if the holder dies bearing it, the holder's soul is forfeit to hell.
Plot
Keawe, a poor Native Hawaiian, buys a strange unbreakable bottle from a sad, elderly gentleman in San Francisco who credits the bottle with his fortune. He promises that an imp residing in the bottle will also grant Keawe his every desire. However, the bottle must be sold, for cash, at a loss, i.e. for less than its owner originally paid, and cannot be thrown or given away, or else it will magically return to him. All of these rules must be explained by each seller to each purchaser. If an owner of the bottle dies without having sold it in the prescribed manner, that person's soul will burn for eternity in Hell.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “The Bottle Imp” as 1891 short story by Robert Louis Stevenson. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as 1891 short story by Robert Louis Stevenson. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q82737. VIAF identifies the subject as 183467475. The Library of Congress control number is n79140890. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1891.
Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Bottle Imp” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.