Theme: the impossibility of identifying and separating good and evil. Coplex characters.

Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on Nov. 13, 1850. His father (Thomas) was a prosperous second-generation civil engineer. Destined to become a third generation engineer, Robert was not born a healthy baby. Due to his lack of physical strength and also lack of interest in his father`s profession, he decided to study law.  He was called to the Bar in 1875, but never did practice. Since childhood he had been most interested in writing. Beginning in 1871 he started contributing to the `Edinburgh University Magazine` and the `Portfolio`. In 1876 Stevenson met and fell in love with Fanny Osbourne, an American divorcee ten years his senior. In 1878 he publ

The following years were wandering ones for Stevenson, spent in a long effort to find health. Yet in spite of his poor health, Stevenson wrote two collections of delightful essays between 1880 and 1888. These were Virginibus Puerisque (1881) and Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1882). He also wrote a volume of fanciful and entertaining stories, The New Arabian Nights (1882); the ever-popular Treasure Island (1883); Prince Otto (1885), a lovely romance; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.Hyde (1886), a story in which physical change in man symbolizes moral change; Kidnapped (1886) and The Master of Ballantre (1888), two excellent and widely read stories of Scottish life; and two collections of poems, A Child`s Garden of Verses (1885), familiar to many English-speaking children, and Underwoods (1887). Stevenson`s works earned him great popularity because of his clear and careful style, and his extraordinary power as a storyteller. His stories are existing, not because of exaggerations, but because they give an accurate picture of the action, and let the reader feel that he is seeing everything just as if he were present.

Stevenson lived for several years in Switzerland, France and the south of England. In 1887, after the death of his father, he went to America. From there he continued west, embarking on a voyage through the South Pacific, accompanied by Fanny and his widowed mother. He never returned to Scotland. He had at last found a climate that suited his health, and decided to settle on the island of Upolu in Samoa. It was there in his house Vailima that he spent the last years of his life. The people there loved him, and looked up to him. They named him "tusitala", teller of tales. 

Stevenson collaborated with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne to write The Wrong Box (1889), a rather heavy-handed comedy, and The Wrecker (1892), a Pacific adventure story. The immediacy and creative stimulation of the Pacific was strong, but Scotland continued to inspire both fiction and poetry. It was at Vailima that he wrote Catriona (1893), a sequel to Kidnapped, St Ives (unfinished and published after his death in 1897) and Weir of Hermiston (1896, also unfinished). It was Weir he was working at on the day he died. Pivoting on the bitter relationship between a father and son, the novel employs both Scottish tradition and the Scots language with memorable force.

Stevenson died from a stroke in 1894, when he was just 44 years old. Sixty Samoans carried his body to the top of Mount Vaea, where he was buried. 

List of Volumes, sorted by year of publication:

1878 An Inland Voyage 

1878 Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes 

1879 Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes

1881 Viginibus Puerisque and other Papers

1882 Familiar Studies of Men and Books 

1882 New Arabian Nights

1883 Treasure Island

1884 The Silverado Squatters

1885 A Child`s Garden of Verses

1885 More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter (with Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson)

1885 Prince Otto

1886 Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

1886 Kidnapped

1887 The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables 

1887 Memories and Portraits

1887 Underwoods

1888 The Black Arrow: A Tale of Two Roses 

1889 The Master of Ballantrae: A Winter`s Tale

1889 The Wrong Box(with Lloyd Osbourne) 

1890 Ballads

1890 Father Damien: An Open Letter to the Reverend Doctor Hyde of Honolulu from Robert Louis Stevenson 

1892 A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa

1892 Three Plays by W.E. Henley and R.L. Stevenson

1892 The Wrecker (with Lloyd Osbourne)  

1892 Across the Plains With Other Memories and Essays

1893 Island Nights` Entertainments

1893 Catriona

1895 The Amateur Emigrant

1895 Songs of Travel and other Verses 

1896 Fables

1896 Weir of Hermiston: An Unfinished Romance 

1896 In the South Seas

1898 St. Ives: Being The Adventures of a French Prisoner in England 

1899 Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson to His Family and Friends

Bibliography and image source: bibliomania.com and The Writers` Museum, Edinburgh