Robert Louis Stevenson

Henry Walter Barnett / Public domain
1893 photograph

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) was a Scottish writer who, despite (or perhaps because of) his life-ling ill health, became one of the premiere writers of rip-roaring adventure and horror stories of the late 1800s. Best-known for Treasure Island, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Kidnapped, and A Child's Garden of Verses, he was a popular author in his own time, but became rather looked down upon by literary snobs for much of the 20th century. He has since been rediscovered (well, by the snobs, anyway; he never stopped being popularly read) for his humanism, social criticism, and literary skill. He spent the latter part of his life traveling the South Pacific, living some of the adventures he had previously only written about, before finally settling in Samoa where he eventually died at the age of 44.


Treasure Island
In which, for all intents and purposes, the pop culture pirate is created. Peg legs, parrots, the Black Spot, tropical islands, treasure maps, X marks the spots, fifteen men on a dead man's chest, and (indirectly via adaptation) "talking like a pirate," all come back to this tale of Jim Hawkins and his surprisingly complicated relationship with Long John Silver aboard the Hispaniola.

Notes and Illustrations:

• Chapters One and Two
• Chapters Three to Five
• Chapters Six to Eight
• Chapters Nine to Eleven
• Chapters Twelve to Fourteen
• Chapters Fifteen to Seventeen
• Chapters Eighteen to Twenty
• Chapters Twenty-One to Twenty-Three
• Chapters Twenty-Four to Twenty-Six
• Chapters Twenty-Seven to Twenty-Nine
• Chapters Thirty to Thirty-Two
• Chapters Thirty-Three and Thirty-Four