Robert Louis Stevenson

Scottish novelist, essayist and poet Robert Louis Stevenson contributed many beloved classics to the world of children's literature. Stevenson's popularity is based primarily on the exciting subject matter of his adventure novels and stories of the fantastic. Treasure Island (1883), a swiftly paced story of a search for buried gold, portrays good, in the form of the boy Jim and his friends, against evil, as personified by the pirate Pew and the one-legged Long John Silver. In the horror story The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), the extremes of good and evil mushroom startlingly in one character when the physician Henry Jekyll discovers a drug that changes him, first at will and later involuntarily, into the monster Hyde.