Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850. His family expected him to become an engineer, but he was allowed to study law at Edinburgh University, and he ended up writing. Tuberculosis kept him moving, first to Davos in Switzerland and later through France and the Pacific. He spent his last four years in Samoa. He died there in 1894 at the age of 44 and was buried on Mount Vaea.

He began with essays and travel writing. An Inland Voyage appeared in 1878. Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes followed in 1879 and tells of a twelve-day walk through the mountains of south-central France. His fiction ranged from sea adventure to historical romance. The Black Arrow, for example, was deliberately written in archaic-sounding language. He also wrote darker stories about divided selves, and A Child's Garden of Verses (1885) shows a quieter side.

Treasure Island began as a magazine serial in Young Folks in 1881, under the title The Sea-Cook. Kidnapped came out in 1886 and is set in the Scottish Highlands in 1751. It follows the young David Balfour and the reckless Alan Breck. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was published by Longmans, Green on 5 January 1886 and ran to 141 pages in its first edition. In Edinburgh, the Writers' Museum gives him a place beside Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott.

Start with the Jekyll and Hyde book on WebToTell. It is short and fast, and the Penguin Classics edition has an introduction and notes by Robert Mighall, plus further tales of terror. If you want something lighter next, read Treasure Island or Kidnapped for pure adventure.