Robert Louis Stevenson

Born Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson on November 13, 1850, in Edinburgh, the only child of Thomas Stevenson, a prosperous lighthouse engineer, and Margaret Balfour, the daughter of a Church of Scotland minister, Stevenson suffered from severe bronchial illness throughout his life, probably tuberculosis, though this was never definitively diagnosed. His childhood was marked by feverish nights in which his devoted nurse, Alison Cunningham, read him Bible stories and tales of the Covenanters. He enrolled at Edinburgh University to study engineering, as his father wished, but switched to law before abandoning professional ambition altogether in favor of literature. His early travel writings, An Inland Voyage (1878) and Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879), drew notice, but it was Treasure Island (1883), originally serialized for a boys' magazine, that made him famous. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), conceived in a fever dream and drafted in three days, then burned and rewritten in another three at his wife Fanny's insistence, became an instant sensation and gave the English language a lasting metaphor for the duality of human nature. Kidnapped (1886) and A Child's Garden of Verses (1885) followed in rapid succession. In 1888, seeking a climate that might spare his lungs, Stevenson embarked with his family on a series of voyages across the Pacific, eventually settling in Vailima, Samoa, where the locals called him Tusitala, "Teller of Tales." He died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage on December 3, 1894, at forty-four, while opening a bottle of wine for dinner.