Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Scotland in 1850, in New Town in Edinburgh, the son of Thomas Stevenson, an engineer, and Margaret (Maggie) Balfour Stevenson, the daughter of a minister. Even as a child, he was besieged by health problems that would plague him throughout his life. He entered Edinburgh University at the age of sixteen, first studying engineering like his father but moving quickly into law. He would complete this course of study, but never actually practiced law; instead, he began traveling. He began to publish accounts of his travels in 1876, the same year that he met Fanny Osbourne, a woman ten years his senior who would four years later become his wife.
Stevenson...
