Robert Louis Stevenson, born in Edinburgh, Scotland (1850) was a sickly, moderately successful essayist and travel writer, living in France.
One evening he walked to a friend’s house, looked in through the window, and fell instantly in love with a woman sitting there at the table. The woman was Fanny Osbourne and she was both American and unhappily married and had come to Europe to get away from her husband. After spending months getting to know Stevenson, she decided to go back to California. Robert decided to persuade her to divorce her husband and marry him. His health, as always, was terrible, and the trip to the United States almost killed him. He collapsed on Fanny Osbourne’s doorstep, but she nursed him back to health. She did divorce her husband, and they got married in San Francisco and spent their honeymoon in a cabin near an abandoned silver mine.
They moved back to Scotland with her son from her previous marriage, and one rainy afternoon the following summer, Stevenson painted a map of an imaginary island to entertain his new stepson. The map gave him and idea for a story, and in a single month he had written his first great novel, Treasure Island (1883), about the young Jim Hawkins, who finds a treasure map and goes along on a journey to find the treasure, meeting pirates, surviving a mutiny, and getting to know a one-legged cook named Long John Silver. It has been in print now for 134 years.
That book and the idea of the map fascinated me when I was 11 years old. I drew my own island maps and treasure maps and even tried to find local buried treasure.
The love of maps remains. I'm open to a treasure hunt. I made maps and buried treasure for my sons when they were little boys.
Stevenson was one of a series of authors on that "classics" shelf at the library that I thought I should read if I were to be a writer myself one day.
Around the same time that Treasure Island was published, Stevenson woke up one morning and told his family that he did not want to be disturbed until he had finished writing a story that had come to him in a dream. It took him three days to write it, but when he read the story aloud to his wife, she said it was too sensationalistic. So he sat down and rewrote the whole thing. By the end of the week, he was fairly happy with the result, which he called Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1885), about a scientist who invents a chemical that changes his personality from a mild-mannered gentleman to a savage criminal.
Those two books made Stevenson rich and famous. He spent the rest of his life traveling from one place to the next, producing about 400 pages of published work a year. He finally settled on the island of Samoa, where his health improved greatly, and in the last five years of his life, he wrote 10 more books. He died at the age of 44, not from his respiratory illness, but from a stroke. His contemporaries saw him as one of the greatest writers of his generation, but he’s now remembered mainly as a writer of adventure stories. Critics wish he had finished the last novel he had been working on, about colonial life in Samoa, because the fragments that survive are among his best work.
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