In France, Sammy attended boarding school while his mother and sister studies painting. Upon returning to California, he was sent to boarding school in Sonoma. It was from there he joined his mother and stepfather, Robert Louis Stevenson, in Calistoga to celebrate their marriage in 1880. 

After the honeymoon, the family of three moved to Europe. Over the next few years Lloyd (as he was known ever after) attended British boarding school before entering the University of Edinburgh. After the death of Thomas Stevenson, Lloyd accompanied the family to New York, California, and on to the South Seas. 

When it was determined that Stevenson would not survive a return trip to Scotland, Lloyd was sent off on the mission to sell the family’s belongings from the Bournemouth home and bring what was desired to the new home in Samoa. Lloyd lived and worked on the family plantation for the rest of Louis’ life. Throughout their time in the South Seas, Louis and Lloyd often collaborated on story ideas and three of Stevenson’s pieces from that time share authorship with Lloyd.  

After Louis’ death, Lloyd became Vice Consul General for the United States to Samoa and married Katharine Durham in Hawaii in 1896. Together they had two sons, Alan and Louis. 

The rest of Lloyd’s life was spent as an author, actively published but never achieving much acclaim. His mother, who never cared much for his wife Katharine, made Lloyd executor of her will, but left most of her property to Belle, giving a generous allowance to Lloyd but only $5t o Katharine. Shortly after Fanny’s death, Lloyd and Katharine divorced. They briefly remarried again in 1916 only to divorce again. 

The final decades of Lloyd’s life were spent writing and collaborating with his playwright nephew, Austin Strong, and living in Europe. In 1936 he traveled to the South of France where he became involved with a young French woman, Yvonne Payerne, who bore him a son named Samuel. When World War II began, Lloyd returned to California where he died in 1947 on the same day Yvonne and Samuel arrived in New York to join him.