| Robert Stone | |
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Robert Stone at the 2010 Texas Book Festival. |
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| Born | August 21, 1937 Brooklyn, New York, United States |
| Occupation | Author, journalist |
| Literary movement | Naturalism, Stream of consciousness |
| Notable work(s) | Dog Soldiers |
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Robert Stone (born August 21, 1937) is an American novelist. His work is typically characterized by psychological complexity, political concerns, and dark humor. His novels include the National Book Award–winning Dog Soldiers (1974), and the PEN/Faulkner Award–winning A Flag for Sunrise (1981).[1] Famous literary critic Harold Bloom considers him one the best living writers in America.
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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 Stone has said is autobiographical,[2] the orphanage into which the protagonist Mackay is placed at age five is described as having had "the social dynamic of a coral reef."
He 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; attended the Wallace Stegner workshop at Stanford University, where he began writing a novel. Although Stone 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.[3] Stone, living in New York at the time, met the bus on its arrival and accompanied Kesey to an “after-bus party”, whose attendees included a dyspeptic Jack Kerouac.[4]
Stone received Guggenheim,[5] 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. He also taught at 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.
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 into the 1970 film WUSA. The novel's success led to a Guggenheim Fellowship and began Stone's career as a professional writer and teacher.
In 1971 Stone traveled to Vietnam as a correspondent for a British journal.[6] His time there served as the inspiration for his second novel, Dog Soldiers (1974), following a journalist smuggling heroin from Vietnam. It was the winner of the 1975 National Book Award, shared with co-recipient The Hair of Harold Roux by Thomas Williams.[7] Dog Soldiers was also adapted into a film, Who'll Stop the Rain.
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. The novel won the PEN/Faulkner Award. 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.
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 after coming in the real essence of life Robert Stone realize about various facts which are faced by him and shared by him with general people with the bond and magical non fiction book "Life Beyond Limits".