From the time he was a teen-ager until his death in 1894, Robert Louis Stevenson spent his life "casting off" for ports unknown in search of adventure and a place where he could find some relief from his chronic illness. Ironically, the man who longed for adventure and wrote so convincingly about it, was truly an invalid a good deal of his life, and faced death many times. In his writing, however, he exemplifies the severe self-discipline of a professional unremittingly engaged in a life-and-death struggle with style.
Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer, and a leading representative of English literature. He was greatly admired by many authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling and Vladimir Nabokov.
Most modernist writers dismissed him, however, because he was popular and did not write within their narrow definition of literature. It is only recently that critics have begun to look beyond Stevenson's popularity and allow him a place in the Western canon.