Presenting The Essential Robert Louis Stevenson: Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Kidnapped, and The Master of Ballantrae with an introduction by Nicholas Tamblyn, and illustrations by Katherine Eglund. This collection is part of The Essential Series by Golding Books. The life of Robert Louis Stevenson was nearly as unusual and extraordinary as his literary output. By the end of his life, he had settled in the village of Vailima on the Samoan Island of Upolu, having journeyed around the Pacific and bought 400 acres of land there in 1890, and he was buried on Mount Vaea in 1894 at age forty-four. His name is synonymous with far-flung adventure, his books remain amongst the most translated in the world, and his tales are the most set out upon, and then set out upon again, of an abundance of adventures and otherwise interesting tales where, after the passing of so much time, his Treasure Island and other works reign supreme. More than simply pirate fiction novels and sailing or sea classics, or for that matter action adventure books for boys (or merely boys fiction or boys literature, but rather English literature for boys and girls and people of all ages), Stevenson's fantasy adventure novels that are also labeled sea novels and children's classics stand the test of time and expand beyond genre as few books do. No less meaningful is Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. It is a novella apparently quite different to his other celebrated adventure novels; yet in fact, the ideas of human personality and the good and evil in all people explored in the story influenced Stevenson's earliest writings. While many interpret the story--through its omnipresence now in popular culture--as a cautionary tale of our duality, Vladimir Nabokov observed that Dr Jekyll is not a paragon of virtue; written during the Victorian era, it contains more shades of gray than merely "good versus evil," and depicts the striving for respectability in our wider community alongside the inward forces, sometimes darker, that drive or exist in each of us. Robert Louis Stevenson was born Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1850 (he would change the spelling to Louis at about age eighteen, and dropped Balfour in 1873). His mother's side of the family were gentry, and his father, maternal grandfather, and his father's two brothers were all in the profession of lighthouse design. A sickly boy and only child, Stevenson found it difficult to fit in at school and sometimes had private tutors. He went on to study law and passed the bar, but he never practised. He traveled to various parts of Europe, including the French Riviera to recuperate his fragile health, and then devoted himself entirely to travel and writing, before moving to America in 1879 to be with the woman he had fallen in love with in France, Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne. They married in 1880, and spent the next decade traveling to Europe, the Hawaiian Islands, and other southern islands. His most famous works are Treasure Island (1883), Kidnapped (1886), and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). He died at Upolu, an island in Samoa where he had purchased land in 1890, of a likely cerebral haemorrhage in 1894.