Robert Stone

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Robert Stone
Robert Stone at the 2010 Texas Book Festival.
Born	(1937-08-21) August 21, 1937 (age 74) Brooklyn, New York, United States
Occupation	Author, journalist
Literary movement	Naturalism, Stream of consciousness
Notable work(s)	Dog Soldiers
Notable award(s)	National Book Award 1975
Influences Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Influenced John Shannon, Denis Johnson

Robert Stone (born August 21, 1937) is an American novelist. His work is characterized by psychological complexity, political concerns, and dark humor.^{[citation needed]} He won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1975 for his novel Dog Soldiers^[1] and was once a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award.^[2][3] The famous literary critic Harold Bloom considers him one the best living writers in America.^{[citation needed]}

He has also received Guggenheim^[4] 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.

Life

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,^[5] the protagonist Mackay is placed at age five in an orphanage described as having had "the social dynamic of a coral reef".

Stone dropped out of high school in 1954 and joined the Navy for four years, where he worked as a journalist. 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.^[6] 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.^[7]

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

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, with a large cast of often psychologically unstable characters, it set the template for much of Stone's later writing. 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 and teacher.

In 1971 he traveled to Vietnam as a correspondent for a British journal.^[8] 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 (split award).^[1][9] Dog Soldiers was also adapted as a film, Who'll Stop the Rain (1978).

A Flag for Sunrise (1981) further developed Stone's trademark brand of acid-tinged existential realism while continuing to explore broad political and social questions as in his first two novels. The story follows a wide cast of, mostly aimless, characters as their paths intersect in a fictional Central American country. Catalyzing the crises of belief faced by each character is a backdrop of violent political struggle between a U.S.-backed dictator and almost equally corrupt Marxist revolutionaries. It was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award.^[2]

Stone's next two novels focused on smaller-scale conflicts: the psychotic breakdown of a movie actress in Children of Light, and a circumnavigation race in Outerbridge Reach (based loosely on the story of Donald Crowhurst). He returned to current events with Damascus Gate (1998), about a man with messianic delusions caught up in a terrorist plot in Jerusalem.

Nonfiction

Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties (2007) is Stone's recent memoir discussing his experiences in the Sixties "counterculture". It demonstrates Stone's knowledge and insight into a turbulent decade. The autobiographical work begins with his days in the Navy and ends with his days as a correspondent in Vietnam. The work features Stone's insights on Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac from his time spent traveling with them. Stone offers a candid look at sixties drug culture including the use of marijuana, LSD, heroin, and peyote.

Works

• 1967: A Hall of Mirrors
• 1974: Dog Soldiers — winner of the National Book Award^[1]
• 1981: A Flag for Sunrise
• 1986: Children of Light
• 1992: Outerbridge Reach
• 1997: Bear and His Daughter (short stories)
• 1998: Damascus Gate
• 2003: Bay of Souls
• 2007: Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties
• 2010: Fun with Problems (short stories)

References

External links

• Works by or about Robert Stone (novelist) in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Robert Stone Papers at the NYPL
• William C. Woods (Winter 1985). "Robert Stone, The Art of Fiction No. 90". The Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2845/the-art-of-fiction-no-90-robert-stone. 
• "Robert Stone, Classic interview with the author of Damascus Gate", Identity Theory, April 20, 2009
• Interview with Robert Stone after publication of his memoir Prime Green LA Weekly, January 17, 2007
• "Antarctica, 1958" by Robert Stone, The New Yorker (June 12, 2006).
• "The Apostle of the Strung-Out" (Interview), Salon (April 14, 1997).
• "Kera Bolonik Talks to Robert Stone" (Interview) Bookforum (Summer 2003).