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Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850. He was an intelligent but sickly child and so he started to make up stories to entertain himself. He once wrote, 'I have three powerful impressions of childhood: my sufferings when I was sick, my delights in convalescence at my grandfather's manse of Colinton, near Edinburgh, and the unnatural activity of my mind after I was in bed at night.' During the summer of 1881, Stevenson and his family were staying in a cottage in Braemar in Scotland. One afternoon he began drawing a map to amuse his stepson, but found that he himself was carried away, 'As I pored upon my map of Treasure Island , the future characters of the book began to appear there visibly among imaginary woods: and their brown faces and bright weapons peeped out upon me from unexpected quarters ... the next thing I knew, I had some papers before me and was writing out a list of chapters'. And so Treasure Island was begun and published in 1881. Robert Louis Stevenson is the author of Kidnapped and The Children's Garden of Verses as well as the adult book, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. During his short life Stevenson travelled the world from the South Pacific to the USA, Europe to Australia. He died at the age of 44 years old on a small Samoan island in the Pacific.
It is a breathless journey and the closest thing to a real pirate adventure without an eye patch and a time machine... It is a unique work of genius -- Eoin Colfer, author of Artemis Fowl There are few novels which grip so thrillingly as those first read in childhood, and for me none which has quite matched the excitement of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island -- P.D. James Who can think of a pirate without conjuring up the image of Long John Silver? * Daily Mail * So what makes these different to any other set of classics? In a moment of inspiration Random House had the bright idea of actually asking Key stage 2 children what extra ingredients they could add to make children want to read. And does it work? Well, put it this way...my 13-year-old daughter announced that she had to read a book over the summer holiday and, without any prompting, spotted The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas...and proceeded to read it! Now, if you knew my 13-year-old daughter, you would realise that this is quite remarkable. She reads texts, blogs and tags by the thousand - but this is the first book she has read since going to high school, so all hail Vintage Classics! * National Association for the Teaching of English *
