Robert Louis Stevenson came from a famous Edinburgh family of engineers who built lighthouses around the coast of Scotland, and he was expected to join the firm. He was a sickly child, often in bed with fevers and coughs, and he was raised largely by his devoted nurse, Alison Cunningham, who filled his head with Bible stories and tales of Scottish martyrs. Years later he dedicated A Child’s Garden of Verses to her.

He tried engineering at university, then law, and qualified as a lawyer, but he never practiced. What he wanted was to write and to travel. His early books were travel books, among them Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879), about walking across the mountains of southern France with a stubborn donkey named Modestine.

In France he met Fanny Osbourne, an American woman ten years older than he was, separated from her husband, with two children. When she went home to California, Stevenson followed her across the Atlantic and the continent, nearly dying along the way, and in 1880 they married.

Treasure Island began with a map. On a rainy holiday in the Scottish Highlands in 1881, Stevenson and his stepson Lloyd drew and colored an imaginary island, and Stevenson began making up a story to go with it, reading each chapter aloud to the family in the evening. It ran in a boys’ magazine and then became a book in 1883, and it gave us almost everything we think we know about pirates: the treasure map marked with an X, the parrot on the shoulder, the one-legged sea cook, Long John Silver. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) came, he said, from a nightmare, and was written at tremendous speed. Kidnapped followed the same year.

Searching for a climate that would let him breathe, Stevenson sailed the South Pacific with his family, and in 1890 they settled in Samoa, where they built a house called Vailima. The Samoans called him “Tusitala,” the teller of tales, and he took their side in disputes with the colonial powers. He died there suddenly in December 1894, at forty-four. He was buried on top of Mount Vaea, above the house, and on his grave are lines from his poem “Requiem”: “Home is the sailor, home from sea, / And the hunter home from the hill.”