Treasure Island
Read this if you…
- Want the book that invented modern pirate mythology
- Want a fast moving plot driven book
Skip this if you…
- Want any depth whatsoever
- Already feel you've seen this story a hundred times in adaptations
- Don't like reading dialogue written "pirate like" that takes a while to read
The 
Take
Quick and easy, fun little plot. Long John silver is an awesome character, and cool how Stevenson invented the pirate mythology that’s lives to the modern day. However, I was never wowed by any specific passage or use of language
The lineage through Treasure Island
- Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. Treasure Island built on it. - Stevenson named Defoe outright among his sources in _My First Book_, and the borrowing shows: Ben Gunn is a marooned castaway lifted straight from the _Crusoe_ mold, down to the goatskin clothes and the constant talk of Providence. - Where Defoe's island is an empty workshop to be tamed by industry and faith, Stevenson keeps the marooning and the solitude but swaps in buried gold, mutiny, and a skeleton. Critics read Ben Gunn as a sly parody of Crusoe, exaggerating his religious posturing until piety looks like a goatskin you slip on and off.
Depicted in Art
Long John Silver, parrot on his shoulder, leans toward the boy Jim Hawkins in conspiratorial conversation.
N. C. Wyeth, 1911
Captain Smollett stands defiant at the stockade, raising the British colors as Silver's mutineers mass below.
N. C. Wyeth, 1911
Jim Hawkins clings to the rigging of the Hispaniola, twin pistols leveled, warning the wounded Israel Hands not to climb after him.
N. C. Wyeth, 1911
Pirates gather over a table by lamplight as the dreaded black spot is pressed into a sailor's palm.
N. C. Wyeth, 1911
The marooned, ragged Ben Gunn emerges from the trees of the island to confront a startled Jim Hawkins.
George Roux, 1885
The scarred old buccaneer Billy Bones stands sword in hand outside the Admiral Benbow inn, sea-cloak whipping in the wind.
N. C. Wyeth, 1911
Recommended Editions
Penguin Classics
1999
The standard affordable reading paperback. John Seelye's introduction does the scholarly work without burying you, and the clean text is the one to hand a first-time reader.
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Notable Quotes
Fifteen men on the dead man's chest— Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum! Drink and the devil had done for the rest— Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
Screen & Stage
looseMuppet Treasure Island
Film · 1996
Brian Henson
Treasure Island
Film · 1950
Byron Haskin
Treasure Island
Film · 1934
Victor Fleming
looseBlack Sails
TV · 2014
Robert Levine
Posters via The Movie Database (TMDB)
- Henry James, novelist & critic, 1843–1916: "I call Treasure Island delightful, because it appears to me to have succeeded wonderfully in what it attempts."
- Jorge Luis Borges, writer, 1899–1986: Borges revered Stevenson all his life — he reread him, wrote a poem about Blind Pew from the opening of Treasure Island, and co-edited a Stevenson anthology, counting his prose among the few pure forms of happiness in literature.
- Ernest Hemingway, novelist, 1899–1961: As a boy laid up with mumps, Hemingway devoured Treasure Island — one of the Stevenson books he kept among his lifelong favorites.
- Richard Branson, entrepreneur, 1950–: Put Treasure Island on his list of '65 books everyone should read in a lifetime.'
- Elton John, musician, 1947–: Counted Treasure Island among the favorite books of his childhood, saying it fueled his imagination of pirates and buried treasure.
- Jimmy Buffett, musician, 1946–2023: Included Treasure Island on the desert-island reading list in his memoir A Pirate Looks at Fifty.