Robert Louis Stevenson was an essayist, poet, novelist, and nonfiction writer.
He became one of the most famous writers of the 19th century with works like The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Treasure Island (1882).

Robert Louis Stevenson was born on November 13, 1850 in Edinburgh, Scotland. His parents were Thomas and Margaret Isabella Balfour Stevenson, and his nurse was Alison «Cummy» Cunningham.

Stevenson was a sickly child, and suffered from tuberculosis from an early age. Of course, those days in bed also gave him time to read and write.

When he grew up he began attending Edinburgh University. He started off by studying engineering, and then he studied law. He passed the Scottish bar in 1875.

His earliest works are descriptions of his journeys: An Inland Voyage (1878), describing a canoe trip through Belgium and France in 1876; and Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879), an account of a journey on foot through mountains in southern France in 1878

Stevenson’s popularity is based primarily on the exciting subject matter of his adventure novels and stories of the fantastic.

The idea for Treasure Island was ignited by a map that Stevenson had drawn for his 12-year-old stepson; Stevenson had written a pirate adventure story to accompany the drawing, and it was published in the boys’ magazine Young Folks from October 1881 to January 1882. When Treasure Island was published in book form in 1883, Stevenson got his first real taste of widespread popularity, and his career as a profitable writer had finally begun. The book was Stevenson’s first volume-length fictional work, as well as the first of his writings «for children.» By the end of the 1880s, it was one of the period’s most popular and widely read books.

In the horror story The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), The year 1886 saw the publication of what would be another enduring work, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which was an immediate success and helped cement Stevenson’s reputation. The work is decidedly of the «adult» classification, as it presents a exploration of various conflicting characters hiding within a single person. The book went on to international acclaim, inspiring countless stage productions and more than 100 motion pictures.

In the last years of his life Stevenson and his family traveled to the islands of the Pacific Ocean,
Several of his later works are about the Pacific isles, including The Wrecker (1892), Island Nights’ Entertainments (1893), The Ebb-Tide (1894) and In the South Seas (1896).

Robert Louis Stevenson died of a stroke on December 3, 1894, at his home in Vailima, Samoa. He was buried at the top of Mount Vaea, overlooking the sea.