Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850, and in his many wanderings, his love for Scotland never waned. His ancestors were lighthouse builders, and in a poem he celebrates “the towers we founded and the lamps we lit.” He studied engineering and law, but soon discovered that his calling was literature. He was an architect of style. He believed that the practice of prose was more difficult than that of verse, since prose demands continuous, pleasing, and concatenated variations. He was driven south by the respiratory disease from which he suffered; he traveled in Belgium, France, and Switzerland, always painting and writing. He married the American widow Fanny Osbourne in 1880, and in fact, Treasure Island is dedicated to her son Lloyd. His life was largely an exodus in search of good health and in 1890 he settled in Upolu, the main island of Samoa, where he lived until his death in Vailima on December 4, 1894. The natives had nicknamed him Tusitala, the Storyteller. In his vast body of work, his most famous novel was perhaps Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which contains history, drama, the critical or autobiographical essay, the short story, the novel and verse.