Treasure Island
A map, a sea chest, a one-legged cook and a schooner whose crew is not what it seems. Stevenson began with a map he drew for his stepson, and the book retains the feeling of a story invented out of a picture. Nearly every pirate convention in later fiction was fixed here.
Stevenson was born in Edinburgh and trained as a lawyer before turning to writing. What lifts the book above a boys' adventure is the narration: Jim Hawkins is a child who sometimes acts bravely and sometimes acts foolishly, and the danger is described at his eye level.
Public-domain status
First published in 1883. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Robert Louis Stevenson died in 1894, so this work has been free to republish there since 1965.
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