Treasure Island

Treasure Island, originally titled The Sea Cook: A Story for Boys, is an adventure and historical novel by the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson. It was serialised from 1881 to 1882 in Young Folks and first published as a book on 14 November 1883 by Cassell & Co. The novel is set in the eighteenth century.

The book is traditionally considered a coming-of-age story, and it is also described as a wry commentary on the ambiguity of morality, most obviously in the character of Long John Silver, which was unusual for children's literature at the time and since. Its plot is the search for buried treasure on an island, complicated by a crew that intends to take it for itself.

Its influence on how pirates are imagined is the reason it is still read. Treasure maps marked with an X, schooners, the Black Spot, tropical islands and one-legged seamen carrying parrots all come to popular culture largely through this novel, and it is one of the most frequently dramatised of all novels, adapted for stage, film and television repeatedly. The story is set in the eighteenth century and reaches the island by sea, so once the voyage begins the ship's company is the whole of its society.