Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was born on November 13, 1850, in Edinburgh, Scotland, the only child of Margaret Balfour Stevenson and Thomas Stevenson, a lighthouse engineer. The formative years of Stevenson's life were influenced by his father's emphasis on duty and responsibility, and his mother's warm affection.

These two forces played a great part in the development of both Stevenson's personal attitudes and the themes and topics of his writing. He tended to rebel against the stern old-world rigors of Scottish culture and to appreciate deeply the warmth and sympathy of human affection. His poor health intensified his desire to escape the cold and the austere; Stevenson contracted tuberculosis when a child and was intermittently ill for the rest of his life. The first sign of true rebellion, at first not revealed to his parents but later causing a rupture with his father, was his disaffection...