Portal:Speculative fiction/Selected biography/52

Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson (13 November 1850 – 3 December 1894) was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer. Stevenson has been greatly admired by many authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Marcel Schwob, Vladimir Nabokov, J. M. Barrie, and G. K. Chesterton, who said of him that he "seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins".

His speculative fiction works include Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which helped establish Stevenson's wider reputation, The Bottle Imp, the story of magical bottle which contains an imp capable of granting wishes for a price, New Arabian Nights, a collection containing Stevenson's first published short fiction, The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables, another collection of short stories, and Island Nights' Entertainments, a collection of three of his stories (including The Bottle Imp).

Stevenson was seen for much of the 20th century as a writer of the second class, condemned by literary figures such as Virginia Woolf. He is now being re-evaluated as a peer of authors such as Joseph Conrad (whom Stevenson influenced with his South Seas fiction) and Henry James, with new scholarly studies and organizations devoted to Stevenson. No matter what the scholarly reception, Stevenson remains very popular around the world. According to the Index Translationum, Stevenson is ranked the 25th most translated author in the world, ahead of fellow nineteenth-century writers Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe.