There was something rotten inside Robert Louis Stevenson, as there is in all of us to varying degrees, but he had a name for it: Mr. Hyde. Not to suggest the author’s voluminous and varied output can be reduced to one novella–I’m talking about the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, of course–but it’s rare that something can be written about the human mind, in this case the subconscious, that will be true as long there are people.

An article in the December 17, 1894 Brooklyn Daily Eagle announced the death of the sickly author, who’d once described himself as “a mere complication of cough and bones.” He’d actually perished two weeks earlier from a cerebral hemorrhage he experienced while living on the Samoan Islands. His last words were a question posed to his wife: “Does my face look strange?”