Treasure Island

“Over Treasure Island I let my fire die in winter without knowing I was freezing.”

Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was an indefatigable writer of novels, poems, essays, letters, travel books, and children’s books, despite being tormented by poor health throughout his life. Born in Edinburgh on November 13, 1850, into a prosperous family of lighthouse engineers, he was expected to enter the family profession but instead studied for the Scottish bar. By the time he was called to the bar, he had already begun writing seriously and never practiced law.

In 1880, he married Fanny Vandegrift Osbourne, an American divorcee ten years his senior. Though his family initially disapproved, they were soon reconciled, and the marriage was a happy one.

Stevenson traveled extensively, often in search of improved health. He and Fanny journeyed from California and Scotland to Switzerland, France, the American Adirondacks, and finally the South Seas. His novels, such as Treasure Island (1883), Kidnapped (1886), The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and The Master of Ballantrae (1889), reveal a profound sense of landscape and atmosphere, often inspired by his travels.

Deteriorating health led Stevenson to settle in Samoa in 1889, where he was given patriarchal status by the natives. Although his health improved, he remained homesick for Scotland. His last, unfinished masterpiece, Weir of Hermiston (1896), was a return to his homeland in spirit.

Stevenson died suddenly on December 3, 1894, not of tuberculosis, but of a cerebral hemorrhage. At the height of his creative powers and at the age of forty-four, the master of transformations collapsed while fetching wine, uttering a final, bewildered question to his wife about his own altered state.

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