Robert Louis Stevenson

Born in Edinburgh in 1850, Stevenson battled lifelong bronchial illness but wrote and traveled relentlessly. He moved through London literary circles as a young man, drawing encouragement from editors and poets, one of whom likely inspired Long John Silver. Between 1883 and 1886 he published Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Kidnapped - the novels that made him a celebrity. In 1890 he settled in Samoa, alarmed by colonial encroachment on the South Sea islands, and his fiction turned from romance toward darker realism. He died of a stroke at his island home in 1894, forty-four years old, and is now the 26th-most-translated author in the world.