Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 1894) was a Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer whose restless imagination and gift for storytelling produced some of the most beloved adventures in English literature. Born in Edinburgh to a family of celebrated lighthouse engineers, he defied expectations of a practical career and, despite lifelong ill health, roamed from the Cévennes to California to the South Seas in search of warmer climes and fresh material. From these wanderings and from his own fevered dreams came Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, works that have thrilled generations and shaped the modern traditions of adventure fiction and psychological horror alike. He died at forty-four on his beloved Samoa, where the islanders buried him on a mountaintop overlooking the sea.
