Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850, the only child of Thomas Stevenson, an engineer from a famous family of lighthouse builders. He was often ill as a child and was cared for by his devoted nurse, Alison Cunningham, whose stories fed his imagination. He studied engineering and then law at the University of Edinburgh and qualified as a lawyer, but he wanted to write. He traveled for his health and wrote about a canoe trip and a walking tour with a donkey in France. In France he met Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, an American, and in 1880, after traveling to California, he married her. Treasure Island (1883), written as a story for boys, made him famous, and it was followed by A Child's Garden of Verses (1885), Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Kidnapped (1886). In 1888 he sailed with his family to the South Pacific, and in 1890 he settled on the island of Upolu, in Samoa, where he took the Samoan name Tusitala, 'teller of tales'. He died there in 1894, aged 44.

Robert Louis Stevenson is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: His reading shook his belief in Christian dogma; he found harsher Scottish Calvinism repugnant. Source: Dictionary of National Biography (1885–1900) (via Wikisource)