Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), born as Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson, was a novelist, essayist, travel writer and poet. He was born in Edinburgh's New Town on November 13th 1850, and died 44 years later Stevenson of a brain haemorrhage, on December 3, 1894, on Upolu, a small Samoan island; there he was known as "Tusitala" ("Teller of Tales"). He was buried at the summit of Mount Vaea (475m). When his wife, Fanny, died in 1914 in California, her ashes were brought to Samoa to be buried alonside her husband.

His father, Thomas Stevenson was a joint-engineer to the Board of Northern Lighthouses, and inventor of, among other things, the marine dynamometer, which measures the force of waves. His mother, Margaret Balfour, was the youngest of the thirteen children of a Scottish clergyman, the Reverend Lewis Balfour. His grandfather, Robert Stevenson was Britain's most famous builder of lighthouses, whose achievements include the Bell Rock Lighthouse. "Stevenson College" in Edinburgh is named after him. .

From the age of six, Stevenson lived at 17 Heriot Row, an elegant Georgian house in Edinburgh's New Town. This home is now a hospitality venue known as "The Stevenson House" There, he was educated at home because of his poor health,, with a Scottish nanny, Alison Cunningham (Cummy), who he later claimed was a major influence, and to whom he dedicated A child's garden of verses (1885). He developed an early interest in writing, dictating "A History of Moses" to his mother when he was six.

Since his childhood Stevenson suffered from tuberculosis. In 1867 he entered Edinburgh University to study engineering, but changed to law and in 1875 was called to the Scottish bar. His first works were published in The Edinburgh University Magazine (1871).

Instead of practicing law, Stevenson turned to writing travel sketches, essays, and short stories. He published an account of his canoe tour of France and Belgiumin 1878 as An Inland Voyage, and Travels With A Donkey In The Cevennes was published in 1879. In France, Stevenson met Fanny Vandegrift Osbourne, a married American woman eleven years older, with two children, and separated from her husband. In 1879 he moved with her to California marrying her in 1880 after her divorce. After a short stay at Calistoga (recorded in The Silverado Squatters), they returned to Scotland, and then moved often, searching for a climate that would be better for Stevenson's precarious health.

In 1887, after the death of his father, Stevenson returned to the USA, living for a year at Saranac Lake, N.Y., in the Adirondacks. In 1889, he and his family set out on a cruise of the South Sea Islands, and he settled on the island of Upolu in Samoa, where he bought a plantation (Vailima) and built a house. Stevenson's observations on Samoan life were published in In the South Seas (1896) and in A Footnote to History (1892). In Samoa, Stevenson wrote Catriona (1893), an unfinished sequel to Kidnapped, and Weir of Hermiston also unfinished at his death.

His best known works are Treasure Island (1883) and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). His best known poem is the epitaph he wrote for himself, Requiem:

UNDER the wide and starry sky

Dig the grave and let me lie:

Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you 'grave for me:

Here he lies where he long'd to be;

Home is the sailor, home from the sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.