Stevenson's popularity is based primarily on the exciting subject matter of his adventure novels and stories of the fantastic. Treasure Island (1883), a swiftly paced story of a search for buried gold, portrays good, in the form of the boy Jim and his friends, against evil, as personified by the pirate Pew and the one-legged Long John Silver.

In the horror story The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), the extremes of good and evil mushroom startlingly in one character when the physician Henry Jekyll discovers a drug that changes him, first at will and later involuntarily, into the monster Hyde. The action in Kidnapped (1886) is triggered by a stolen inheritance, that of young David Balfour, who subsequently becomes party to the perilous escapades of the proud Highlander outlaw Alan Breck.

MAJOR WORKS:
• Treasure Island
• The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
• Kidnapped
• A Child's Garden of Verses