Robert Louis Stevenson

Stevenson was born into a family of lighthouse engineers and was expected to join them. He refused, read law to placate his father, never practised, and spent his life in flight from Edinburgh's cold and from his own lungs, which were failing from childhood.

Treasure Island began as a map he drew to entertain his stepson on a wet holiday. Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde came out of a nightmare and was written at extraordinary speed; the first draft went into the fire, and the version we have was rewritten in days. Between them he produced Kidnapped, a body of essays, and some of the most quoted verse in English, most of it composed by a man who was frequently forbidden to speak, and often writing propped up in bed.

In 1888 he chartered a yacht for the South Seas and never came home. He settled at Vailima in Samoa, where he was called Tusitala, the teller of tales, learned enough of local politics to attack the colonial administration in print, and was liked well enough that Samoans cut a road to his house. He died there in 1894, at forty-four, of a cerebral haemorrhage — suddenly, and not of the lungs that had threatened him all his life.