Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis (Balfour) Stevenson (November 13, 1850 – December 3, 1894), was a Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer.

Fiction

• Treasure Island (1883) His first major success, a tale of piracy, buried treasure, and adventure, has been filmed frequently. It was originally called The Sea-Cook. The seeds of this novel came together for Stevenson circa 1879 as he walked on the sands of the beach at Monterey, California.
• The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses (1884) An historical adventure and romance set during the Wars of the Roses. It features an unusual subplot involving crossdressing. This novel presents the Wars of the Roses, as it were, in miniature.
• Kidnapped (1886) is an historical novel that tells of the boy David Balfour's pursuit of his inheritance and his alliance with Alan Breck in the intrigues of Jacobite troubles in Scotland. Catriona (1893), also known as David Balfour, is a sequel, telling of Balfour's further adventures.
• The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), a short novel about a dual personality much depicted in plays and films, also influential in the growth of understanding of the subconscious mind through its treatment of a kind and intelligent physician who turns into a psychopathic monster after imbibing a drug intended to separate good from evil in a personality.
• The New Arabian Nights (1882), a collection of tales.
• The Body Snatcher (1885), another influential horror novel.
• The Wrong Box, (1892), with Lloyd Osbourne, a comic novel of a tontine, also filmed (1966). A tontine is a group life-insurance policy in which the last survivor gets all the insurance. Both in the novel and in real life, it is an incentive to murder, and no longer legal in most countries.
• The Master of Ballantrae (1888), a masterful tale of revenge, set in Scotland and America.
• Weir of Hermiston (1896), novel, unfinished at his death, considered to have promised great artistic growth.