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Robert Louis Stevenson was born on November 13, 1850 in Edinburgh, Scotland. A sickly child, he was often confined to bed and continued to suffer from poor health throughout his lifetime. In college, Stevenson rebelled against his conservative and religious upbringing and pursued an unconventional writer's life. Stevenson was a world traveler, and his first book, An Inland Voyage (1878) chronicles his canoeing adventures in France. His voyages took him as far as California, Hawaii, and the Samoan Islands. While bedridden with severe respiratory issues, Stevenson produced his best-known works, the children's classics Treasure Island (1883) and Kidnapped (1886), and the allegorical thriller Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and & Mr. Hyde (1886). Robert Louis Stevenson died on December 3, 1894 in Vailima, Samoa. Caroline Levine is David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English at Cornell University. She has written three books: The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (2003), Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts (2007), and Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015). She is the nineteenth-century editor for the Norton Anthology of World Literature. |
