Robert Louis birthday

Robert Louis (originally Lewis) Balfour Stevenson was born on November 13, 1850, at 8 Howard Place in Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland. He was the son of Thomas Stevenson (1818-1887), a civil engineer who worked on lighthouses, and his wife Margaret Isabella (born Balfour 1829-1897).

From an early age, he was pressured by his father to follow in the same career, but his fragile health and weak inclination for the field led him to choose an alternative path.

In 1866, he enrolled in the Law Faculty at the University of Edinburgh. There, he wrote for the university newspaper, the Edinburgh University Magazine, in 1871 and 1872, revealing his taste and talent for art and literature.

In 1873, after completing his studies, Robert moved to the city of London, England, as he felt out of place in the family environment, marked by a coercive atmosphere and inexorable Puritan morals and religiosity. During his short stay in the city, he began attending literary salons and later embarked on a long journey through Europe.

The year 1876 was significant in his personal life because he met an American woman ten years his senior, named Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, in France. They married in 1880 in San Francisco, United States. He returned to England with his wife and stepson, named Lloyd Osbourne. The following year, he was admitted to Davos, Switzerland, to treat his tuberculosis, from which he had suffered for years. He published his first book, a travel narrative, in 1878.

He gained artistic notoriety in 1886 with the publication of "Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," one of his greatest literary successes. With his father's death in 1887, Stevenson returned to the United States, where he continued to address his tuberculosis. The following year, he ventured on a sailboat in various archipelagos of the South Pacific, along with his wife and stepson. Enamored by the paradisiacal landscape, he settled permanently in Apia, Samoa, in 1889.

He died prematurely on December 3, 1894, at the age of 44, while writing his unfinished masterpiece, "Weir of Hermiston," a victim of a cerebral hemorrhage. He is buried in Stevenson Family Estate Grounds, Vailima, Tuamasaga, Samoa.