Robert Louis Stevenson

A novelist, poet, travel writer and representative of the New Romantics in English literature, Scottish-born Robert Louis Stevenson was hugely popular in his day, causing many critics and 'modernists' to dismiss him. He came from a long line of engineers and lighthouse builders, his grandfather Robert being the force behind the infamous Bell Rock Lighthouse, and his parents rather hoped, in vain, that he might follow in their footsteps. He studied law, though never practised, and he was a prolific traveller, often seeking the more temperate climes that he hoped would help cure his tuberculosis. In the 1890s he bought land on a Samoan island and it was here that he succumbed to what was probably a cerebral haemorrhage at the young age of just 44. He is still buried there, on Mt Vaea. Hugely influential on writers such as Rudyard Kipling, Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad, he is ranked '25th in the World' of most translated authors. "There are no foreign lands. It is the traveller only who is foreign." Robert Louis Stevenson