With a cryptic map and dreams of wealth, Jim Hawkins, along with Captain Smollett and the crew of the ship Hispaniola, arrives on the island where the legendary pirate Captain Flint is said to have buried his treasure. Yet, with a crew composed largely of Flint’s former henchmen, mutiny is on the horizon. Ben Gunn becomes Jim’s friend, but Long John Silver, Captain Flint’s one-legged cook, proves to be a formidable adversary.
Treasure Island, from 1883, is a sort of adventure novel’s adventure novel, a genre-defining work that has grown into its own mythology, featuring characters with a luminosity matched by few others. It has been adapted into films and reworked many times, but the original novel continually draws new generations of readers into its enchanting orbit.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON [1850–1894] was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer. He is among the 30 most translated authors of all time and has been praised by Marcel Proust, Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, Ernest Hemingway, and Bertolt Brecht. Treasure Island is his most famous work, along with the gothic sci-fi novella Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde.
