Stevenson, Robert Louis

Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850–94),Scottish novelist, essayist, poet, and traveler, in 1880 married an American, Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, whom he had followed from Europe to California. Among the literary results of his sojourn in the U.S. are The Silverado Squatters (1883), The Amateur Emigrant (1894), Across the Plains (1894), and a lost, unpublished “experiment in sensation,” Arizona Breckonridge; or, A Vendetta of the West, of which he finished only three parts. In 1887–88 he returned to the U.S., living for several months at Saranac Lake, writing essays for Scribner's Magazine and, with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne, a farcical story, The Wrong Box (1888). In 1888, financed by the publisher S.S. McClure, he went to Samoa and the South Seas, where his writing included a vindication of Father Damien; and, with Osbourne, The Wrecker (1892), partly set in San Francisco, in which Pinkerton is modeled on McClure, and The Ebb‐Tide (1894), set in the South Seas.