Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1850. Stevenson liked to regard his childhood as a golden age; in reality it was also, as he later admitted, full of unpleasant dreams，sleeplessness and feverish colds, which resulted from a lung condition.
In September 1857, Stevenson went to Mr. Henderson's School, but because of physical weakness he stayed only a few weeks and didn't return until October 1859. In October 1864, he was sent to Robert Thomson's private school. Stevenson became a student at the
University of Edinburgh from November 1867 and began half-heartedly to prepare himself for the engineering profession. In April 1871, he finally told his father he had no interest in engineering and cared for nothing but literature. His father was naturally disappointed, but he agreed that as a compromise his son should read law first. In fact, Stevenson published a historical essay in 1866 at his fathers' expense.
All through his university years, when he was looked upon as a lazy student ignoring his formal education, Stevenson was in fact reading widely and conscientiously（勤勉认真地）learning how to write by composing descriptions of what he saw and, above all, by setting himself to imitate（模仿）the way authors wrote. In this way, he learned from a wide range of authors.
A turning point in Stevenson's life came in the summer of 1873 when he met Professor Sidney Colvin and his friend Mrs. Frances Sitwell, who recognized his potential and did all they could to support him. Colvin became Stevenson's literary adviser and closest friend. In1875. he became a lawyer, but he soon gave up the profession and devoted himself to literary work. Under Colvin's influence, Stevenson's essays began to appear in magazines. From 1876, he began to write a series of essays containing light-hearted observation son life, and they became very popular.
