Robert Louis Stevenson, one of the masters of the Victorian adventure story, was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on November 13, 1850. He was often sick as a child, and respiratory troubles plagued him throughout his life. He enrolled at Edinburgh University at the age of seventeen with the intention to study engineering, but ended up studying law instead. He became a qualified lawyer but did not pursue the profession, choosing instead to become a full-time writer. As a young man, he traveled through Europe, leading a bohemian lifestyle and penning his first two books, both travel narratives. Stevenson felt constrained by the strict social norms of the Victorian era during which he lived, and many of his works demonstrate a sharp tension between upstanding duty and reckless abandon.
