The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Tapa dura

Originally planned for serialization in Longman's Magazine, and written in less than ten weeks from first conception, this story was instead published separately and earned Stevenson a substantial royalty of one-sixth of the retail price on all copies sold, with an immediate advance for the first 10,000, and half of all proceeds from foreign sales; it won a rave review in The Times ("every connoisseur...must certainly read it twice...he works out the essential power of Evil") and sold 40,000 copies in the first six months. It touched a raw nerve in the late-Victorian imagination. As Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote to a friend, "You are certainly wrong about Hyde being overdrawn; my Hyde is worse." Vladimir Nabokov asserted in his Cornell lecture "that it was a fable belonging to the same order of art as...Madame Bovary."

Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson (13 November 1850 – 3 December 1894) was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer. His best-known books include Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Stevenson has been greatly admired by many authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Marcel Schwob, Vladimir Nabokov, J. M. Barrie, and G.K. Chesterton, who said of him that he "seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins."