Robert Louis Stevenson

A neo-Romanticist, Robert Louis Stevenson was a prominent Scottish author and poet, who contributed immensely to English literature in his lifetime. Many modernist writers canned his ideas and works and it is only lately that critics have started to gauge his popularity and have allowed him an ineffaceable place in the world of western literature. Today, he is one of the ‘26 most translated authors in the world’ and has served as an inspiration for writers like Ernest Hemingway, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack London, Rudyard Kipling and Jorge Luis Borges. Some of his most notable works include ‘Treasure Island’, ‘Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ and ‘A Child’s Garden of Verses’. When one reads the factual works of Robert Louis Stevenson, apart from his fictional novels and short stories, a more comprehensive depiction of the writer arises than that of the quixotic drifter, which people most often associated him with. He was not just a novelist, but a literary wizard tangled in the productions of his craft, its locale and its depth. An astute spectator of humanity, his work discloses his sagacious mind and always successfully manages to build a rapport with the reader through elegiac flair and expression.