“[Stevenson’s] short stories are certain to retain their position in English literature,” judged Arthur Conan Doyle. “His serious rivals are few indeed. Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Stevenson; those are the three … who are the greatest exponents of the short story in our language.”

The publication of Treasure Island in 1883 brought Stevenson enormous acclaim. Written as an entertainment for his twelve-year-old stepson, the rousing tale of pirates and buried treasure proved universally popular. “Over Treasure Island I let my fire die in winter without knowing that I was freezing,” recalled J. M. Barrie, and Henry James predicted, “Treasure Island will surely become—it must already have become and will remain—in its way a classic.” “[Stevenson is] a master of narrative,” observed V. S. Pritchett. “He places his scenes at a fitting distance from each other, with an unflurried order and particularity, so that we do not blunder into them but are quietly brought to the point where the view is best.… He is a writer of brilliant beginnings. He catches the sensation of being athletically alive, which is especially the gift of youth. In Treasure Island this sense of physical action is wonderful and youth’s dominant preoccupation with its own fear and courage plays naturally upon it. The timidity, the pride, the caution, the heady excitement of youth, its day dreams and admirations, are wonderfully rendered.” Novelist William Golding agreed: “When one turns to Treasure Island, one sees immediately that Stevenson was the professional knowing precisely what effects he wanted and how he was going to get them. Every chapter is shaped and fitted into the general structure like the timbers of a ship.”

Stevenson soon enhanced his reputation with Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), a psychological thriller that sprang from the deepest recesses of his own subconscious. A brilliantly original study of the dual aspects of human nature, it endures today as the quintessential Victorian parable of good and evil. “Robert Louis Stevenson has become immortalized by way of his private fantasy—which came to him, by his own testimony, unbidden, in a dream,” observed Joyce Carol Oates. “The visionary starkness of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde anticipates that of Freud: there is a split in man’s psyche between ego and instinct, between civilization and ‘nature,’ and the split can never be healed.” Vladimir Nabokov considered it “his most wonderful book,” comparing Stevenson’s “shilling shocker” to Madame Bovary and Dead Souls as “a fable that lies nearer to poetry than to ordinary prose fiction.”

A few months later, in another burst of creative energy, Stevenson completed Kidnapped (1886). Set in the Scottish Highlands during the aftermath of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, this classic of high adventure interweaves the drama of Scottish history with the psychological moral growth of its adolescent hero, David Balfour. J. M. Barrie rated Kidnapped “the outstanding boy’s book of its generation,” and Mark Twain wrote to Stevenson, “My wife keeps re-reading Kidnapped and neglecting my works. And I have not blamed her; I do it myself.” V. S. Pritchett reflected that “Kidnapped is far more than a boy’s book.… [It] contains a universal statement about the loyalties and uncertainties of youth.” And Stevenson biographer Ian Bell noted, “Kidnapped says as much about Stevenson as any autobiography. In David Balfour and Alan Breck he gave substance to two sides of his own character, adventurer and rationalist, man of duty and man of passion.” Stevenson subsequently turned out three more tales embedded in the fierce loyalties and violent enmities of Scottish history: The Master of Ballantrae (1889), Catriona (1893), and the unfinished Weir of Hermiston (1896).

Though perhaps best known for his fiction, Stevenson was also a celebrated essayist as well as a popular poet. In collections such as Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881), Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1882), and Memories and Portraits (1887) he offered idiosyncratic views on everything from dreams, umbrellas, political activism, and jingoistic Victorian mores to the art and craft of fiction.