Robert Louis Stevenson wrote three of the most enduring stories in English literature. Each one invented something the genre had never seen before.

He is underestimated in the way that only writers of extreme narrative skill tend to be underestimated — as if the pleasure a story gives is evidence against its seriousness. Treasure Island invented the template for the adventure novel so completely that every pirate story written since is either following it or reacting against it. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde gave the English language a phrase — and a psychological concept — that has outlasted almost everything published in the same decade. Kidnapped is the least famous of the three and arguably the most accomplished: a novel of identity, loyalty, and the specific texture of Scotland in 1751 that has no equal in the literature of place.

This edition brings together all three complete texts alongside three original critical afterwords and a full biography written for this edition.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde — a respectable London lawyer investigates the connection between his friend Henry Jekyll and the violent, repellent Edward Hyde; the novella that understood something about the divided self before psychology had the vocabulary to name it.

Treasure Island — Jim Hawkins finds a treasure map in a dead pirate's chest, and what follows is one of the most perfectly constructed adventure novels in any language; Long John Silver, who is simultaneously the villain and the most compelling character in the book, remains one of fiction's great achievements in moral ambiguity.

Kidnapped — David Balfour, cheated of his inheritance and shipped off to be sold into slavery, finds himself on the run across the Scottish Highlands with Alan Breck Stewart, a Jacobite fugitive; a novel about two men who distrust each other completely and depend on each other entirely.

✦ The complete, unabridged texts of all three works — nothing condensed or omitted — together with three original critical afterwords and a full biography of Robert Louis Stevenson by Henry Bugalho.

This edition also includes:

✦ A Literary Analysis of Stevenson's Three Masterworks — a critical reading of the three works as a unified body of achievement: the narrative techniques, the moral intelligence, and what each invented that fiction had not done before

✦ Stevenson and His World: The Historical Context — the Edinburgh of Stevenson's childhood, the Victorian publishing world, the serialization culture that shaped Treasure Island, and the social conditions the three works were simultaneously inhabiting and contesting

✦ The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson — a full biographical account: from the lighthouse builder's son in Edinburgh through his wandering years in France, California, and the South Seas, to his death in Samoa at forty-four

For readers who enjoy:

✦ Classic English adventure fiction — and the writer who invented its template

✦ Gothic and psychological fiction — and the novella that gave psychology one of its central metaphors

✦ Historical literary fiction set in Scotland, the high seas, and the Victorian moral imagination

✦ The complete arc of one of the most naturally gifted storytellers in the English language

"I am in the habit of looking not so much to the nature of a gift as to the spirit in which it is offered."