Classic Authors Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1850. He was a frail child, who was greatly influenced by his father’s punishments and by his nurse’s horrifying tales of demons.

Stevenson refused to follow the family profession of engineering and chose law when he went to the University of Edinburgh to study. But he soon gave that up and turned to writing, which his poor health could not deter.

After he married an American woman, Stevenson and his devoted wife traveled throughout the world trying to improve his delicate health while he continued his writing. In the four years between 1883 and 1887, Stevenson wrote his four longest and greatest novels: Treasure Island, The Black Arrow, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Kidnapped, and his famous book of poems, A Child’s Garden of Verses.



The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was born in a nightmare, but Stevenson remembered enough of it when he awoke to get it down on paper. Within three days he had the entire first draft written. He intended this book not only as a “thriller,” but also as a study of good and evil, which are always at war within man.
Stevenson and his family spent his last years on the South Pacific island of Samoa where he continued his writing until he collapsed and died in 1894 at the young age of forty-four.

Classic Authors Johann Rudolf Wyss & Lyman Frank Baum

Johann Rudolf Wyss was born in Bern, Switzerland on March 13, 1781. He was the son of a pastor who entertained young Johann and his brothers at bedtime with adventure tales of a shipwrecked preacher and his family.



Johann had a fine education at several German universities, and in 1806 he became a professor at the University of Bern and also its head librarian. But Professor Wyss never lost his love of literature. This led to his collecting and editing Swiss folk stories and to his writing of the Swiss national anthem. But it wasn’t until 1813 that Johann Wyss gained worldwide fame when he wrote, edited, and published his father’s bedtime stories under the title of The Shipwrecked Preacher and His Family: An Instructional Book for Children and Their Friends in City or Country. This was later to be shortened to the now famous Swiss Family Robinson.

Immediately after its publication, The Swiss Family Robinson was translated into many languages, including English. Over the years, it has become one of the most popular books for generations of European and American children-a popularity which Wyss lived to see and enjoy until his death in 1830.

Lyman Frank Baum was born on May 15, 1856, in Chittenango, New York. He began his writing career as a teenage reporter for the New York World. Within two years, he was the publisher of a small town newspaper in Pennsylvania.



As a young man, Baum also acted in road companies and wrote plays. One of his musical comedies was produced in New York. He returned to journalism in 1880. Lyman Baum married and had four sons. He settled in Chicago where he founded a trade journal, which helped him to support his family while he continued writing fiction.
The Wizard of Oz, which was first published in 1900, became so popular among its readers that Baum wrote thirteen sequels to the original story. In addition, he wrote books for girls under the pen name of Edith Van Dyne. L. Frank Baum died in 1919.

Charles Dickens: Is He One of Your Favourite Classic Authors?

Charles Dickens was born in England, in 1812, the second of eight children of a debt-ridden government clerk. Because his family had handled their money poorly, young Charles was sent to work in a London factory at the age of ten. This experience upset him so greatly and left such an impression on him that he later created poor, suffering people as the heroes of many of his novels and cruel, selfish rich ones as the villains.

An unexpected, small legacy permitted Charles to break free of the slave factory and return to school. He became a newspaper reporter-a job which helped him to observe people and to create scenes that live in his readers’ memories.

With the appearance of The Pickwick Papers in 1836 and 1837, Charles Dickens, at age 24, became the most popular novelist in England. This popularity increased with the publication of David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations, and A Tale of Two Cities.

Dickens had a keen interest in politics and in improving social conditions. He used this interest to weave the exciting characters and events in France and in England that led up to the French Revolution in his historical novel, A Tale of Two Cities.

Much of Charles Dickens’ life was spent writing, editing, touring to read his novel, and promoting many charities to help the poor. He was active in all this work until his death in 1870.

Classic Authors Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

As a boy in England, Arthur Conan Doyle enjoyed reading detective stories. But he was working his way through medical school and didn’t have much time for writing.

However, in 1886, as the twenty-seven-year-old Dr. Doyle sat in his new office hoping for patients. He decided to try writing a detective story. And so, Mr. Sherlock Holmes was born.



Over the years, Doyle himself came to be recognized as an expert on crime. He solved many real-life criminal cases and proved the innocence of men who had been imprisoned for crimes they didn’t commit.

Doyle interrupted his writing career to serve as a doctor with the British Army during the Boer War in Africa. Afterwards, he wrote two books explaining why the British had to fight the war. For these efforts, Doyle was knighted by King Edward VII and he became Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

During a visit to the moor country in western England, Doyle became so interested in a legend about a hound, that he used it as a plot for a new book. This book became the greatest of all of Holmes’ adventure, The Hound of the Baskervilles.
Many of sixty Sherlock Holmes stories have been translated into other languages and have been made even more popular in plays, movies, radio, and TV.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died in 1930 at the age of seventy-one. But each day, the number of his readers increases, as someone discovers, for the first time, the amazing Mr. Holmes.