Robert Stone (born August 21, 1937) is an American novelist.
He won the
National Book Award for Fiction in 1975 for his novel
Dog Soldiers[1] and was twice a finalist for the
Pulitzer Prize and once for the
PEN/Faulkner Awards.
[2][3][4][5] Dog Soldiers was adapted as a film,
Who'll Stop the Rain in 1978 starring
Nick Nolte, and
Time magazine included it in its
TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.
[6]
He has also received Guggenheim
[7] and
National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, the five-year Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award, the
John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, and the
American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award.
His best known work is characterized by
action-tinged adventures, political concerns and
dark humor. Many of his novels are set in unusual, exotic landscapes of raging social turbulence, such as the
Vietnam War; a post-coup violent
banana republic in Central America;
Jim Crow-era
New Orleans, and late 1990's
Jerusalem.
Robert Stone was born in
Brooklyn, New York. Until the age of six he was raised by his mother, who suffered from
schizophrenia; after she was institutionalized, he spent several years in a Catholic
orphanage. In his short story "Absence of Mercy", which he has called autobiographical,
[8] the protagonist Mackay is placed at age five in an orphanage described as having had "the social dynamic of a coral reef".
The battered protagonists and "harrowing creations" in Stone's fiction often transmit a "mix of gloom and bleak irony" that would seem to come from Stone's personal experience: he had a difficult upbringing (besides his mother's schizophrenia, his father abandoned Stone's mother soon after his birth)
[9] and Stone has had his share of struggles with alcohol and drugs.
[10] Stone dropped out of high school in 1954 and joined the
Navy for four years. At sea, he went to many remote places, including
Antarctica and
Egypt. These nautical experiences were at times violent; he witnessed the
French Army bombing
Port Said.
In the early 1960s, he briefly attended
New York University; worked as a copyboy at the
New York Daily News; married and moved to
New Orleans; and attended the
Wallace Stegner workshop at Stanford University, where he began writing a novel. Although he met the influential
Beat Generation writer
Ken Kesey and other
Merry Pranksters, he was not a passenger on the famous 1964 bus trip to New York, contrary to some media reports.
[11] Living in New York at the time, he met the bus on its arrival and accompanied Kesey to an "after-bus party" whose attendees included a dyspeptic
Jack Kerouac.
[12]
At age 72, just after the publication of his second short-story collection
Fun With Problems, Stone admitted (during a newspaper interview) that he suffered from severe
emphysema: "It's my punishment for chain-smoking," he says. But with a wry laugh, he recalls his reaction to being told of the harm smoking could cause him in old age: "I'm not going to know I'm alive!".
[10]
Stone has taught in the creative writing program at Yale University. For the 2010–2011 school year, he has been the Endowed Chair in the English Department at Texas State University-San Marcos.
Fiction[edit]
In 1967, Stone published his first novel,
A Hall of Mirrors, which won both a
Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship, and a
William Faulkner Foundation Award for best first novel. Set in
New Orleans in 1962 and based partly on actual events, the novel depicted a political scene dominated by right-wing racism, but its style was more reminiscent of Beat writers than of earlier
social realists: alternating between
naturalism and
stream of consciousness. It was
adapted as a film,
WUSA (1970). The novel's success led to a
Guggenheim Fellowship and began Stone's career as a professional writer.
In 1971 he traveled to Vietnam as a
correspondent for an obscure British journal called "Ink".
[13] His time there served as the inspiration for his second novel,
Dog Soldiers (1974), which features a journalist smuggling heroin from
Vietnam. It shared the 1975 U.S.
National Book Award with
The Hair of Harold Roux by
Thomas Williams.
[1][14]
Stone's third book,
A Flag for Sunrise (1981), was published to unanimous critical praise and moderate commercial success. The story follows a wide cast of characters as their paths intersect in a fictionalized
banana republic based on
Nicaragua. The novel was a finalist for the
PEN/Faulkner Award and the
Pulitzer Prize.
[4][2]
In contrast to the grand, somewhat satirical adventure epics Stone is commonly associated with, his next two novels were smaller-scale character studies: the misfortunate tale of a Hollywood movie actress in
Children of Light, and an eccentric at the midst of a
circumnavigation race in
Outerbridge Reach (based loosely on the story of
Donald Crowhurst), published in 1986 and 1992 respectively. The latter was a finalist for the National Book Award for 1992.
[15]
Bear and His Daughter, published in 1997, is a short story collection that lost the
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to
American Pastoral by
Phillip Roth.
[3] He returned to describing social turbulence with
Damascus Gate (1998), about a man with
messianic delusions caught up in a terrorist plot in
Jerusalem. The novel was a finalist for the National Book Award for 1998.
[16]
Nonfiction[edit]
Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties (2007) is Stone's memoir discussing his experiences in the 1960s "
counterculture". The autobiographical work begins with his days in the Navy and ends with his days as a correspondent in Vietnam. Besides Ken Kesey, this work features Stone's insights on
Neal Cassady,
Allen Ginsberg, and
Jack Kerouac from his time spent traveling with them.
[17]
