Robert Stone

Robert Stone (August 21, 1937 – January 10, 2015) was an American novelist.

He won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1975 for his novel Dog Soldiers and was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and once for the PEN/Faulkner Awards. 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.

He has also received Guggenheim 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, 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) and Stone had his share of struggles with alcohol and drugs. Stone dropped out school in 1954 after he was kicked out of a Marist high school during his senior year. Soon afterwards, Stone 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. 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.

Stone taught in the creative writing programs at various university programs around the United States. He was at Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars from 1993–1994 and subsequently at Yale. For the 2010–2011 school year, Stone was the Endowed Chair in the English Department at Texas State University-San Marcos. He was also active in many of the writing seminars in and around Key West, Florida where he resided during the winter months.

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!".

According to his literary agent, Stone died from Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease on January 10, 2015 in Key West. He was survived at the time by his wife (of 55 years) Janice and their two (adult-age) children daughter Deirdre and son Ian.

Fiction

Stone's first novel, A Hall of Mirrors, appeared in 1967. It 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". 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.

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. The book was also a finalist for the National Book Award twice, once as a hardcover and once as a paperback.

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.Bear and His Daughter, published in 1997, is a short story collection that lost the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to American Pastoral by Philip Roth.

Stone returned to the complex political novel 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. It was followed in 2003 by Bay of Souls. The final novel that Stone published in his lifetime was Death of the Black-Haired Girl which appeared in 2013.

Nonfiction

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.

Works

• 1966: A Hall of Mirrors
• 1974: Dog Soldiers — winner of the National Book Award
• 1981: A Flag for Sunrise (novel)
• 1986: Children of Light (novel)
• 1992: Outerbridge Reach (novel)
• 1997: Bear and His Daughter (short stories)
• 1998: Damascus Gate (novel)
• 2003: Bay of Souls (novel)
• 2007: Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties (memoir)
• 2010: Fun with Problems (short stories)
• 2013: Death of the Black-Haired Girl (novel)