Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1850, the son of a prominent engineer famous for building lighthouses. Although expected to continue the family profession, Stevenson’s earliest interests were literary. He studied law and was admitted to the bar but never practiced. Suffering from lifelong respiratory illness, he traveled extensively in search of a beneficial climate, living in Switzerland, the United States, and the Polynesian Islands. His first book was a travel book about a French canoe trip, but he soon branched out into poetry and fiction, including his massively popular children’s adventures Kidnapped and Treasure Island, as well as more subtle and morally ambiguous work such as his classic science fiction The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He died in Samoa in 1894.
