Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850. The son of a prosperous civil engineer, he was expected to follow the family profession but finally was allowed to study law at Edinburgh University. Stevenson reacted violently against the Presbyterian respectability of the city's professional classes and this led to painful clashes with his parents. In his early twenties he became afflicted with a severe respiratory illness from which he was to suffer for the rest of his life.
In 1879 he nearly killed himself traveling to California to marry Fanny Osbourne, an American ten years his senior. Together they continued his search for a climate kind to his fragile health, eventually settling in Samoa, where he died on 3 December 1894. Stevenson's Calvinistic upbringing gave him a preoccupation with predestination and a fascination with the presence of evil. In Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde he explores the darker side of the human psyche, and the character of the Master in The Master of Ballantrae (1889) was intended to be all I know of the Devil. Stevenson began his literary career as an essayist and travel writer, but the success of Treasure Island (1883) and Kidnapped (1886) established his reputation for tales of action and adventure. Kidnapped and its sequel Catriona (1893), The Master of Ballantrae, and stories such as Thrawn Janet and The Merry Men also reveal his knowledge and feeling for the Scottish cultural past.
During the last years of his life Stevenson's creative range developed considerably, and The Beach of Falesa brought to fiction the kind of scene now associated with Conrad and Maugham. At the time of his death Robert Louis Stevenson was working on The Weir of Hermiston, at once a romantic historical novel and a reworking of one of Stevenson's own most distressing experiences, the conflict between father and son.
John Seelye is graduate research professor of American Literature at the University of Florida. He is the author of The True Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain in the Movies: A Meditation, and Prophetic Waters: The River in Early American Literature.
In 1879 he nearly killed himself traveling to California to marry Fanny Osbourne, an American ten years his senior. Together they continued his search for a climate kind to his fragile health, eventually settling in Samoa, where he died on 3 December 1894. Stevenson's Calvinistic upbringing gave him a preoccupation with predestination and a fascination with the presence of evil. In Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde he explores the darker side of the human psyche, and the character of the Master in The Master of Ballantrae (1889) was intended to be all I know of the Devil. Stevenson began his literary career as an essayist and travel writer, but the success of Treasure Island (1883) and Kidnapped (1886) established his reputation for tales of action and adventure. Kidnapped and its sequel Catriona (1893), The Master of Ballantrae, and stories such as Thrawn Janet and The Merry Men also reveal his knowledge and feeling for the Scottish cultural past.
During the last years of his life Stevenson's creative range developed considerably, and The Beach of Falesa brought to fiction the kind of scene now associated with Conrad and Maugham. At the time of his death Robert Louis Stevenson was working on The Weir of Hermiston, at once a romantic historical novel and a reworking of one of Stevenson's own most distressing experiences, the conflict between father and son.
John Seelye is graduate research professor of American Literature at the University of Florida. He is the author of The True Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain in the Movies: A Meditation, and Prophetic Waters: The River in Early American Literature.
