Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was a sickly individual and struggled against poor health and tuberculosis throughout his life. He studied law at University and was admitted to the bar in 1875, but never practiced due to an ever growing passion for writing. In 1880, at the age of thirty, he married Frances Osbourne, an American divorcee ten years his senior. In 1883 he wrote the first of the two books for which he is best known, 'Treasure Island', and in 1886, 'The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde'. In search of climates that would be better suited to his fragile health, he moved to one of the Islands in what is now Western Samoa in 1889 and continued to write, but eventually succumbed to ill health and died after five years at the comparitively young age of forty-four.