Robert Louis Stevenson

Treasure Island Robert Louis Stevenson Deseret Alphabet edition

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayest, and travel writer. A member of a prominent family of lighthouse engineers, he had a life-long love of the sea, and ocean voyages dominated much of his life and writings. He spent the bulk of his adult life in America and Polynesia; he is buried on Mount Vaea on the island of Samoa. He endured years of ill-health and died at the age of 44, probably of a cerebral hemorrhage.



Treasure Island is Stevenson's first great success and has remained popular since its publication in 1881. It has been adapted, modified, and filmed incessantly. This one book is reponsible for most of the tropes still commonly used in stories about pirates: buried treasure, maps marked with an X, parrots, missing legs, and colorful nautical jargon, among others. The villainous Long John Silver remains the Platonic ideal of the pirate in the popular imagination.



This book is in the Deseret Alphabet, a phonetic alphabet for writing English developed in the mid-19th century at the University of Deseret (now the University of Utah).