Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850 into a famous family of lighthouse engineers. Sickly from childhood, with chronic lung disease, he was often bedridden and listened to the stories his nurse told him. His family wanted him to follow them as a lighthouse engineer, but against his father's wishes he turned to law and finally to literature. All his life he travelled in search of a healthier climate, through France, Switzerland and America, and once crossed the mountains of southern France with a donkey. In France he fell in love with a married American woman ten years his senior, and later crossed the ocean to California to marry her. A treasure map he drew for his stepson became the seed of Treasure Island. In his last years he settled in Samoa in the South Pacific, where the islanders called him 'Tusitala', the teller of tales; he died of a brain haemorrhage at forty-four and is buried on a mountaintop there.