Robert Louis Stevenson
(1850-1894)

Scottish Writer

A sickly and imaginative only child, Lewis, later Louis, turned off the family career path of engineering to study law, but writing was always his first love. Travels abroad to escape the Edinburgh cold gave him material for his writing, and it was on a trip to France that he met his future wife, an American divorcee with two young children. Almost all of Stevenson’s most famous work was written after his marriage: Treasure Island was written in 1882 for Lloyd, his stepson. Kidnapped and Catriona followed, but it was The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which explored the duality of good and evil present in all his works, that shot him to fame in 1886. With his family and mother he eventually left Scotland for good, ultimately settling on Samoa in the South Seas. He was writing Weir of Hermiston at the time of his death; unfinished, it remains his masterpiece.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Tales of Terror (Penguin Classics) By Robert Louis Stevenson. Everyone has a dark side. Dr Jekyll has discovered the ultimate drug. A chemical that can turn him into something else. Suddenly, he can unleash his deepest cruelties in the guise of the sinister Hyde. Transforming himself at will, he roams the streets of fog-bound London as his monstrous alter-ego. It seems he is master of his fate. It seems he is in complete control. But soon he will discover that his double life comes at a hideous price.

Dreams of Elsewhere: Selected Travel Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson Best known for his fiction writing, Robert Louis Stevenson was also an essayist, journalist, poet and travel writer. His first major work was An Inland Voyage, an account of his journey by canoe from Antwerp to northern France. The companion work to this, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879), is widely regarded as a travel-writing classic. Skinner Sawyers has brought together the most comprehensive and representative sampling of Robert Louis Stevenson's prolific travel output, including excerpts from his most famous travel books, travel essays and travel poetry. The result is a collection that is as vivid and compelling as his fiction, with a number of previously unpublished works from US collections. There are endlessly fascinating portraits of flesh-and-blood human beings, and it becomes apparent that he never grew tired of meeting new people, or of seeking new adventures. The story-teller always finds stories to tell and Stevenson was a consummate storyteller. In the tranquility of a French pine forest by moonlight he considers the importance of friendship; in a leper colony on Hawaii he reflects on physical horror and moral beauty; in all of his writing there is humanity and compasssion.