Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish writer born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1850. He died in Samoa in 1894, aged 44. Few writers have had the genius to create a mythic story that each generation reimagines for itself; Stevenson did so twice, with "Treasure Island" and "Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde".
Stevenson was born into a dynasty of engineers and lighthouse-builders. He acted the "privileged layabout" until literature lit his true path. A lung disease—probably not tuberculosis but a rarer genetic condition—meant he could cough up "a pint of blood", and a search for health sent him first to France and then across the Pacific.
He married Fanny Osbourne, an intrepid, pistol-toting Midwesterner who had endured the American West at its wildest and had two surviving children from a previous marriage. Henry James, a friend, enjoyed everything Stevenson wrote and felt privileged "to encounter someone who does write—who is really acquainted with that lovely art".
"Treasure Island" began with Stevenson and his stepson Lloyd drawing maps of an imaginary island and inventing stories about it. Part of the plot of "Jekyll and Hyde" came to Stevenson in a nightmare; his cries of horror woke Fanny.
Stevenson's advice to writers: "fewer adjectives" and "more descriptive verbs".
In 1888 Stevenson began his Pacific idyll on the yacht Casco. He settled on the Samoan island of Upolu, where local people honoured their tusitala (storyteller) with a lavish banquet. His estate at Vailima was "virtually a palace". He wrote eloquently of Samoan life and pressed in print for independence, incensed that "the handful of whites have everything". He died of a stroke shortly after.
It's always darkest just before the lights go out.