Robert louis stevenson biography timeline reporting system

Robert Louis Stevenson, whose best-known works include Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, was born on the 13 th November

The Life section of the RLS Website is devoted to telling the story of Stevenson — who he was, where he travelled, who his friends and family were, and what he wrote. For more detailed information, go to the Timeline page. Here you will find a list of Biographies written about Stevenson, as well as a list of Film, Video and Radio Documentaries that have been made about the author.

Finally, you can find a listing of portrayals of Stevenson in fiction, films and poetry. His father Thomas belonged to a family of engineers who had built many of the deep-sea lighthouses around the rocky coast of Scotland. His mother, Margaret Isabella Balfour , came from a family of lawyers and church ministers. At the age of seventeen he enrolled at Edinburgh University to study engineering, with the aim — his father hoped — of following him in the family firm.

However, he abandoned this course of studies and made the compromise of studying law.

Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish writer and the son of a wealthy civil engineer.

His first published volume, An Inland Voyage , is an account of the journey he made by canoe from Antwerp to northern France, in which prominence is given to the author and his thoughts. A companion work, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes , gives us more of his thoughts on life and human society and continues in consolidating the image of the debonair narrator that we also find in his essays and letters which can be classed among his best works.

The meeting with his future wife, Fanny , was to change the rest of his life. Two years later she returned to California and a year after that, in August , RLS set out on the long journey to join her. This experience was to be the subject of his next large-scale work The Amateur Emigrant written , published in part in and in full in , an account of this journey to California, which Noble 14 considers his finest work.

In this work of perceptive reportage and open-minded and humane observation the voice is less buoyant and does not avoid observation of hardship and suffering. The light-hearted paradoxes and confidential address to the reader of the essays written a few years before and then published as Virginibus Puerisque continue in the creation of that original debonair authorial persona.

Concluding this first period of writing based closely on his own direct experiences is The Silverado Squatters , an account of their three week honeymoon at an abandoned silver mine in California. Stevenson has an important place in the history of the short story in the British Isles: the form had been elaborated and developed in America, France and Russia from the midth century, but it was Stevenson who initiated the British tradition.