Throughout his life, Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was tormented by poor health. Yet despite frequent physical collapses-mainly due to constant respiratory illness-he was an indefatigable writer of novels, poems, essays, letters, travel books, and children's books. He was born on November 13, 1850, in Edinburgh, of a prosperous family of lighthouse engineers. Though he was expected to enter the family profession, he studied instead for the Scottish bar. By the time he was called to the bar, however, he had already begun writing seriously, and he never actually practiced law. In 1880, against his family's wishes, he married an American divorcée, Fanny Vandegrift Osbourne, who was ten years his senior; but the family was soon reconciled to the match, and the marriage proved a happy one.
All his life Stevenson traveled-often in a desperate quest for health. He and Fanny, having married in California and spent their honeymoon by an abandoned silver mine, traveled back to Scotland, then to Switzerla
