Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)

Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer. Stevenson was a celebrity in his own time, but with the rise of modern literature after World War I, he was seen for much of the 20th century as a writer of the second class, relegated to children's literature and horror genres.Condemned by authors such as Virginia and Leonard Woolf, he was gradually excluded from the canon of literature taught in schools. His exclusion reached a height when in the 1973 2,000-page Oxford Anthology of English Literature Stevenson was entirely unmentioned.

The late 20th century saw the start of a re-evaluation of Robert Louis Stevenson as an artist of great range and insight, a literary theorist, an essayist and social critic, a witness to the colonial history of the Pacific Islands, and a humanist. Stevenson remains very popular around the world.