Treasure Island

When young Jim Hawkins finds a sea chest in the room of a dying sailor at his parents' inn, he opens a map to an island where a dead pirate's treasure lies buried. Soon Jim is aboard the schooner Hispaniola, bound for the Caribbean with a gentleman, a doctor, and a crew that is not what it seems — for the ship's one-legged cook, the genial Long John Silver, is quietly assembling a mutiny.

What follows is the most influential adventure story in the English language: a chase for gold that becomes, almost without the reader noticing, a study of courage, trust, and the seductiveness of a charming villain. Silver is brave and funny and warm and utterly without scruple, and Stevenson never lets us decide which of his faces is the mask. Around him gather the figures that fixed the pirate forever in the popular imagination — the parrot crying "Pieces of eight," the marooned castaway Ben Gunn, the black spot, the cross on the map.

Told in Jim's own voice, looking back on the boyhood voyage that made and marked him, Treasure Island moves with a speed and economy that have never been bettered. Stevenson wrote it a chapter a day to amuse his young stepson; he made instead a book that schoolboys and prime ministers have stayed up all night to finish for nearly a century and a half.

This edition presents the complete novel in clean, modern typesetting, with an editor's foreword on the book's composition and craft, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.