Contributed/Wikipedia

On this day in history, a storytelling heavyweight was born. 

The city of Edinburgh has deep roots in the literary world, from being an inspiration for novels like Harry Potter and Frankenstein, to being the rearing ground for true masters of the craft like Arthur Conan Doyle, Sir Walter Scott, and arguably the most Scottish of them all: Robert Louis Stevenson.

Stevenson was born to a family of lighthouse engineers, only to reject the family trade in favor of writing. Despite his chronic respiratory illness that would plague him for his entire life, he spent much of his early years traveling Europe and America, where he met his future wife, Fanny Osbourne, in California.

Perhaps it was his assumption that his illness would cut his life short, but whatever the reason, he lived his life at full throttle, tending to bury himself in whatever project he was working on to the point of near collapse. Many consider The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to be his most famous work, with its infamy fueled by the fact that Stevenson wrote it in under three days at the pitch of a horrible fever. The iconic transformation scene was inspired by a nightmare Stevenson suffered, one he had to be violently woken from by his wife. Jekyll and Hyde has since become a defining work of the 19th-century Gothic genre.

His later work, Treasure Island, cemented him among the great adventure novelists of all time, having been adapted into countless forms throughout the years. Authors like H.P. Lovecraft, Bram Stoker, and his fellow countryman Arthur Conan Doyle cite Stevenson as a major influence on their own works. 

Life eventually carried Stevenson away from his native Scotland to the far reaches of Samoa, where his immersion with the locals earned him the nickname “Tusitala,” or “the teller of tales.” Stevenson used the remainder of his life to advocate for Samoan rights and self-governance, with modern-day Samoa still keeping his memory in admiration. He lived there until his death at 44– his coffin, built months before his actual demise, was used as a bookshelf in his home until the moment of need. 

His grave, positioned on the summit of Mount Valea, bears an epitaph he wrote himself: “Home is the sailor, / home from the sea, / And the hunter home from the hill.” 

Stevenson blended brilliance with an insatiable and eccentric nerve— a man as strange as Dr. Jekyll and life-hungry as Jim Hawkins. 

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