The Father of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde -- Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) was a restless character. Born in Edinburgh, he found the place unsuitable for his frail constitution. This, combined with his wanderlust, meant that he spent much of his life traveling and living outside his native Scotland. The author has been alternately hailed as Scotland's greatest writer and dismissed as nothing more than the creator of tall tales for children, though surely the former is more accurate.
He was the son of Margaret and Thomas Stevenson, born into a family famed for its Scottish civil engineering projects, especially lighthouses. RLS was a sickly child and, as a young adult, something of disappointment to his father. After he allowed his son to bow out of engineering and the lucrative family business, Thomas made Robert attend law school, vowing that "the devious and barren paths of literature" were not suitable. RLS, undaunted, became a writer and a bit of rogue. One of his favorite bars still stands today: Rutherford's on Drummond Street near South Bridge.
Determined to roam ("I shall be a nomad") and write, he went to France where he met and later married an American, Fanny Osborne, with whom he traveled to California. Following the success of The Sea-Cook (1881), which became the ever-popular Treasure Island, Stevenson produced The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, an instant best-seller and his most famous work -- thanks in no small part to later Hollywood adaptations. That was quickly followed by the classic Kidnapped (1886), his most evocative book. It reflects the troubled political times in Scotland after the failed 1745 rebellion of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the book takes its 16-year-old hero on an adventure across the Western Highlands.
Eventually RLS and Fanny settled in Samoa, hoping to find a climate that would suit his scarred lungs. While here, Stevenson worked on the unfinished classic, Weir of Hermiston (published posthumously in 1896). On December 3, 1894, at only 43 years old, he collapsed and died.
