Robert Louis Stevenson
1850–1894 · Scotland
“Fifteen men on the dead man's chest— Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum! Drink and the devil had done for the rest— Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!”
Peak-work percentile in the canon.
The lineage through Robert Louis Stevenson
Drew From(1)
who shaped Robert Louis Stevenson
via Robinson Crusoe
- Stevenson named Defoe outright among his sources in My First Book, and the borrowing shows: Ben Gunn is a marooned castaway lifted straight from the Crusoe mold, down to the goatskin clothes and the constant talk of Providence.
- Where Defoe's island is an empty workshop to be tamed by industry and faith, Stevenson keeps the marooning and the solitude but swaps in buried gold, mutiny, and a skeleton. Critics read Ben Gunn as a sly parody of Crusoe, exaggerating his religious posturing until piety looks like a goatskin you slip on and off.
Portraits
Sargent's full-length 1887 portrait — Stevenson pacing, hand to his moustache, his wife a ghostly figure at the canvas edge. The most celebrated painted likeness, held by the Taft Museum of Art.
John Singer Sargent, 1887
Photographed aboard the schooner Casco during the 1888 Pacific cruise — the iconic image of Stevenson the South-Seas wanderer in his last years.
1888
One of the last and finest photographs of Stevenson, taken by Barnett in Sydney in 1893, the year before his death — a frequently reproduced late likeness.
Henry Walter Barnett, 1893
Famous Quotes
Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17—, and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn.
xen and wain-ropes would not bring me back again to that accursed island; and the worst dreams that ever I have are when I hear the surf booming about its coasts, or start upright in bed, with the sharp voice of Captain Flint still ringing in my ears: "Pieces of eight! pieces of eight!"
'm cap'n here by 'lection. I'm cap'n here because I'm the best man by a long sea-mile.
ere it is about gentlemen of fortune. They lives rough, and they risk swinging, but they eat and drink like fighting-cocks, and when a cruise is done, why, it's hundreds of pounds instead of hundreds of farthings in their pockets.
About Robert Louis Stevenson
Scottish novelist, essayist, poet, and travel writer, born in Edinburgh to a family of celebrated lighthouse engineers. He studied engineering and then law at the University of Edinburgh, qualifying for the Scottish bar in 1875 but never practicing, choosing the precarious life of letters instead. Chronic respiratory illness shadowed his whole career and drove a restless search for a kinder climate, carrying him through France, across the United States, and finally into the South Pacific, where he settled at Vailima in Samoa and was known to the islanders as Tusitala, the Teller of Tales. In a working life cut short at forty-four, he produced the adventure classics Treasure Island and Kidnapped, the children's verse of A Child's Garden of Verses, and the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, whose title became shorthand for the divided self. Hugely popular in his lifetime, dismissed as a mere entertainer for much of the twentieth century, and reassessed by later scholarship, he remains one of the most widely translated authors in the world.