Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 to 1894) was a Scottish novelist, essayist, poet and travel writer, born and educated in Edinburgh. He is best known for the adventure novels Treasure Island (1883) and Kidnapped (1886), the novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and the verse collection A Child's Garden of Verses (1885). Plagued by serious bronchial trouble, he nonetheless wrote prolifically and travelled widely, mixing in London literary circles where Sidney Colvin, Andrew Lang, Edmund Gosse, Leslie Stephen and W. E. Henley encouraged him. He regarded himself as a storyteller in the mould of Sir Walter Scott. In 1890 he settled in Samoa, where concern over European and American influence in the South Seas turned his writing from romance and adventure toward a darker realism. He died there of a stroke at the age of 44.