Google celebrates Robert Louis Stevenson’s 160th birthday today through its logo. Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He studied law, but never went into practice, preferring to write and travel instead. While in France in his mid-twenties, he fell scandalously in love with an older, married American woman named Fanny Osbourne, who eventually divorced and married Stevenson instead. She brought her young son, Lloyd, to live with them.

Inspired by a map of an imaginary island which he drew to entertain Lloyd, Stevenson wrote an adventure story about pirates, buried treasure, and a young man named Jim Hawkins. The book, Treasure Island, published in book form in 1883, became a bestseller which remains in print 125 years later. Three years later, Stevenson published another highly popular short novel, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, about a physician with two opposing personalities. He wrote several more books, essays and poems before dying of a stroke at age 44, leaving unfinished a promising novel-in-progress about life on the Samoan islands.