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At the age of seventeen he enrolled at Edinburgh University to study engineering, with the aim – his father hoped – of following him in the family firm. But he soon abandoned this course of studies and began studying law. He became an advocate in 1875 but did not practice since by now he knew he wanted to be a writer. 

In  summer vacations he went to France to be in the company of other young artists, both writers and painters. His first published work was an essay called “Roads”, and his first published volumes were works of travel writing.

His first published volume, An Inland Voyage (1878), is an account of the journey he made by canoe from Antwerp to northern France, in which prominence is given to the author and his thoughts. A companion work, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879), highlights the qualities of his mind that can be found in his essays and letters.

The meeting with his future wife, Fanny, changed his life. They met soon after the publication of his “An inland voyage”, in September 1876 at Grez,.

He was twenty-five, and she was thirty-six, an independent American “New Woman”, separated from her husband and with two children. Two years later she went to California and a year after that, in August 1879, he set out  on the long journey to join her. This experience was to be the subject of his next large-scale work The Amateur Emigrant,  an account of this journey to California, 

After Fanny obtained a divorce, she and RLS were married in San Francisco in May 1880. Concluding this first period of writing based closely on his own direct experiences is The Silverado Squatters (1883), an account of their three week honeymoon at an abandoned silver mine in California.

In 1890, he settled permanently on the Samoan island of Upolu, where he became involved in local politics, writing passionately for Samoan independence. He died suddenly of a cerebral haemorrhage on December 3, 1894, at age 44, and is buried on Mount Vaea in Samoa.

The Samoan people in the 1890s honoured  Robert Louis Stevenson with this name: tusitala

“tusitala” is a Samoan term that translates to “teller of tales” or “storyteller“. Derived from tusi (to write or to tell) and tala (story or tale), it specifically refers to a revered storyteller or writer.