Essay, Biography or Paragraph on “Robert Louis Stevenson” great author complete biography for Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.

Robert Louis Stevenson

(1850 – 1894)

Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish essayist, poet and author of fiction and travel books, known especially for his novels of ad-venture. Stevenson was born on November 13, 1850 in Edinburgh as the son of Thomas Stevenson, joint-engineer to the Board of Northern Lighthouses. Stevenson’s grandfather was Britain’s greatest builder of lighthouses. Since his childhood, Stevenson suffered from tuberculosis. During his early years, he spent much of his time in bed, composing stories before he had learned to read. At the age of sixteen he produced a short hitorical tale. As an adult, there were times when Stevenson could not wear a jacket for fear of bringing on a haemorrhage of the lung. Due to his ill health, he had to abandon his plans to follow his father’s footsteps. In 1867 he entered Edinburgh University to study engineering,. but changed to law and in 1875 he was called to the Scottish bar. During these years his first works were published in The Edinburgh University . Magazine (1871) and The Portfolio (1873). 

Instead of practicing law, Stevenson devoted himself to writing travel sketches, essays, and short stories for magazines. An ac-count of his canoe tour of France and Belgium was published in 1878 as An Inland Voyage, and Travels With A Donkey In The Cervennes appeared next year. In 1879 Stevenson moved to California with Fanny Osbourne, whom he had met in France. They married in 1880, and after a brief stay at Calistoga, which was recorded in The Silverado Squatters (1883), they returned to Scot-land, and then moved often in search of better climates. Stevenson became famous with the romantic adventure story Treasure Is-land, which appeared in 1883. Among his other popular works are Kidnapped (1886), The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde (1886) and The Master Of Ballantrae (1889). He also con-tributed to various periodicals, including The Cornhill Magazine and Longman’s Magazine, where his best-known article A Humble Remonstrance was published in 1884. It was a reply to Henry James’s rames’s The Art of Fiction and started a lifelonc, friendship between the two authors.

From the late 1880s Stevenson lived with his family in the South Seas, in Samoa. Fascinated by the Polynesian culture, Stevenson wrote several letters to The Times on the islanders’ behalf and published novels like The Beach Of Falesa (1893) and The Ebb Tide (1894), which condemned European colonial exploitation. Stevenson died on December 3, 1894, in Vailima, Samoa. His last work, Weir Of Hermiston (1896), was left unfinished.