It’s the birthday of Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894, #diedtooyoung), best known for his novel Treasure Island (1881) and novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and for being one of the authors featured in the Authors Card Game that some of us grew up playing in the 70s.

Stevenson was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, into a family of—this is a new one to me—lighthouse engineers. His father wanted Stevenson to follow in his footsteps, but Stevenson was not interested in lighthouse engineering, and the two finally agreed that he would study law, which he did at Edinburgh University. He never actually practiced law, instead pursuing his writing. He began by writing travel books, the first of which was An Inland Voyage (1878), about a canoe trip from Antwerp, Belgium, to northern France. (So. That’s apparently a thing. Europe via canoe.) Next came Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879). He also wrote thoughtful, sensitive essays befitting someone with serious respiratory issues.

In 1876, Stevenson met and fell in love with Fanny Vandegrift Osbourne, a married American woman who was separated from her husband. (And she was seven years his senior. *gasp*) He eventually followed her to California, land of sunshine and sin, about which journey he wrote The Amateur Emigrant (1879-80). They finally married in 1880, and in 1883 Stevenson wrote The Silverado Squatters about their honeymoon at an abandoned silver mine. (Stevenson’s classic adventure story about pirates, Treasure Island, had begun to appear in serialized form in 1881.) The couple returned to Scotland to make up with Stevenson’s parents, who had been shocked and appalled by the whole affair-with-a-married-woman thing. Stevenson was by now writing short stories seminal to the development of that genre in Britain. His first stories were collected in New Arabian Nights (1882) and more collections followed, including The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables (1887). (His lovely and enduring book of poems, A Child’s Garden of Verses, appeared in 1885.)

Stevenson and his wife traveled to Davos, Switzerland, several times, where Stevenson had been told to go for his tuberculosis, and then lived in Bournemouth in the south of England for several years, but the climate was bad for his condition and finally they ended up gadding about the South Seas, settling on an estate in the Samoan Islands in 1890. (Fun fact: not long before this, they wintered in Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks.) Stevenson continued writing novels, short stories, and travel books. The climate seemed good for his health, and he was active and productive; when he died suddenly in December of 1894, it was not of tuberculosis but of a brain hemorrhage. He left behind an unfinished novel, Weir of Hermiston, considered his masterpiece. It was published posthumously in 1896. Stevenson is one of the most frequently translated authors in the world.

Have a fine Tuesday wherever you are and stay scrupulously honest to the data.