The True Story of Treasure Island

It was always thought that Treasure Island was the product of Robert Louis Stevenson’s imagination. ______, recent research has found the true story of this exciting work.

Stevenson, a Scotsman, had lived ______ for many years. In 1881 he returned to Scotland for a ______.With him were his American wife Fanny and his son ______.

Each morning Stevenson would take them out for a long ______ over the hills. They had been ______ this for several days before the weather suddenly took a turn for the worse. Kept indoors by the heavy rain, Lloyd felt the days ______.To keep the boy happy, Robert asked the boy to do some ______.

One morning, the boy came to Robert with a beautiful map of an island, Robert ______that the boy had drawn a large cross in the middle of ______. “What’s that?” he asked. “That’s the ______ treasure,” said the boy. Robert suddenly ______ something of an adventure story in the boy’s ______.While the rain was pouring, Robert sat down by the fire to write a story. He would make the ______ a twelve-year-old boy, just like Lloyd. But who would be the pirate (海盗)？

Robert had a good friend named Henley, who walked around with the ______ of a wooden leg. Robert had always wanted to ______ such a man in a story. ______ Long John Silver, the pirate with a wooden leg, was ______.

   The writer Margaret Mitchell, who wrote under the name Peggy Mitchell is best known for writing Gone with the Wind, first published in 1936.Her book and the movie based on it, tell a story of love and survival during the American Civil War. Visitors to the Margaret Mitchell House in Atlanta, Georgia, can go where she lived when she started writing the story and learn more about her life.

Our first stop at the Margaret Mitchell House is an exhibit area telling about the writer's life. She was born in Atlanta in 1900.She started writing stories when she was a child. She once worked as a reporter for The Atlanta Journal newspaper. One photograph of Ms. Mitchell shows her talking to a group of young college boys. She was only about one and a half meters tall. The young men towered over her, but she seemed very happy and sure of herself. The tour guide explains, "Now in this picture Peggy is interviewing some boys from Georgia Tech, asking them such questions as 'Would you really marry a woman who works？' And today it'd be ‘Would you marry one who doesn't work？’"

The Margaret Mitchell House is a building that once contained several apartments. Now we enter the first floor apartment where Ms. Mitchell lived with her husband, John Marsh. They made fun of the small apartment by calling it "The Dump".

Around 1926, Margaret Mitchell stopped working as a reporter and was at home healing after an injury. Her husband brought her books to read from the library. She read so many books that he bought her a typewriter and said it was time for her to write her own book. Our guide says Gone with the Wind became a huge success. Margaret Mitchell received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the book. In 1939 the film version was released. It won ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture.