Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis (Balfour) Stevenson (November 13, 1850 – December 3, 1894) was a Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer, and a leading representative of Neo-romanticism in English literature. He was responsible for two of the most popular works of American literature, Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). The former is one of the most popular children's stories about pirates and buried treasure. The latter is a novella 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 depiction of Jekyll and Hyde is rich in symbolic resonances, representing the intersection of a number of influences and discourses. The novel is part religious allegory, part fable, part detective story, part science fiction, part doppelgänger narrative, and part Gothic fiction.

Stevenson was the man who "seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins," as G. K. Chesterton put it. He was also greatly admired by many authors, such as Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Vladimir Nabokov, and others.[1] Most modernist writers dismissed him, however, because he was popular and didn't write within their narrow definition of literature. It is only recently that critics have begun to look beyond Stevenson's popularity and allow him a place in the canon.