Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish author whose Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde created some of the most enduring adventure and horror narratives in the English language.

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote in constant struggle against tuberculosis that would eventually kill him at forty-four, and the urgency of his prose — the extraordinary energy of Treasure Island, the menace of Dr. Jekyll, the momentum of Kidnapped — reflects a writer who knew he had limited time and spent it accordingly. Treasure Island (1883), serialized in a children’s magazine and initially written to entertain his twelve-year-old stepson, is the adventure novel against which all subsequent adventure novels are measured: the map, the treasure, Long John Silver, and the boy narrator who is brave but not foolish.

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) is his other irreplaceable creation, the source of a phrase — Jekyll and Hyde — that has entered the language as shorthand for any duplicitous nature. The novella is about the Victorian ideology of respectability and what it represses; Hyde is what Jekyll cannot acknowledge about himself, and the horror is precisely that Hyde grows stronger. It has been read psychologically, as social satire, and as a narrative about addiction, with each reading illuminating something genuine.

Kidnapped (1886) and its sequel Catriona (1893) — historical novels about the Jacobite rising and its aftermath — demonstrate Stevenson’s range: his ability to sustain long narratives, create believable historical atmosphere, and develop the relationship between the Presbyterian lowlander David Balfour and the Catholic Highlander Alan Breck Stewart with genuine political and emotional complexity. He spent his final years in Samoa, writing until the hemorrhage that killed him. His essays and travel writing remain worth reading.