Robert Louis Stevenson

“There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.”

Robert Louis Stevenson is an author I read as a kid. He was one of those early "classic" authors that was pushed on you in school, but I really liked his books.

He was born in 1850 and died in 1894. He was a novelist, poet, short-story writer, and essayist. In 1883, while bedridden with tuberculosis, he wrote what would become one of the best known and most beloved collections of children's poetry in the English language, A Child's Garden of Verses.

But his bigger claim to fame (and fortune) comes from the novels Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

After some time in America and a marriage, he moved with his wife back to Scotland with her son from her previous marriage. On a rainy afternoon the following summer, Stevenson painted a map of an imaginary island to entertain his new stepson. The map gave him an idea for a story.

He wrote Treasure Island (1883) in a month. I was intrigued with the story of young Jim Hawkins who found a treasure map. I wanted my own treasure map and wanted to go on a a journey to find the treasure. I didn't really want to run into pirates, a mutiny, or the one-legged cook named Long John Silver. I drew my own treasure maps as a kid and went on my own adventures. I still love maps - and books with maps in them.

His second novel came to him in a dream and he wrote the first draft in three days. His wife thought it was good but not great. He spent the week rewriting and ended up with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1885). This tale of a scientist who invents a chemical that changes his personality from a mild-mannered gentleman to a savage criminal has stayed on reading lists for more than a century. Besides being another kind of adventure, the novel has psychological elements that I think raise it above Treasure Island on the literary bookshelf.

Those two books made Stevenson rich and famous, and he spent the rest of his life traveling and writing about 400 pages of published work a year.

For his health, he finally settled on the island of Samoa. In the last five years of his life he wrote 10 books. He died young - age of 44 - but not from his lingering respiratory illness, but from a stroke.

His reputation during his life was that of a great writer, but today he is somewhat dismissed as an "adventure" writer. 

“Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.”

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