Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish writer whose novels Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde became classics. Before the fiction made him famous he was an accomplished essayist; his early collection Virginibus Puerisque (1881) gathered pieces like “An Apology for Idlers,” a witty defense of leisure and unhurried living. Dogged by chronic illness his whole life, he settled in Samoa and died there in 1894.