Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson was born in 1850 in Edinburgh, the son of a surgeon. He studied sciences at Edinburgh University, and read to become a lawyer, although he never practiced. His first book, An Inland Voyage, was published in 1878, but it was with his early novels, Treasure Island (1883), The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1885), and Kidnapped (1886), that he made his name. He was dogged by health problems from early childhood onward, and was bedridden for a great deal of his life. His illness led him to seek warmer climes, and in 1888 he moved with his family to Samoa, in the South Seas, where he died in 1894 after a prolific, if brief, writing career.