Robert Stone

Infobox Writer
name = Robert Stone


caption =
birthdate = Birth date and age|1937|8|21|mf=y
birthplace = Brooklyn, New York, United States
deathdate =
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occupation = Author, journalist
genre =
subject =
movement =
notableworks = "Dog Soldiers"
influences = Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemingway,Graham Greene, Fyodor Dostoevsky
influenced =
website =

Robert Stone (born August 21, 1937) is an American novelist. His work is typically characterized by psychological complexity, political concerns, and dark humor.Fact|date=September 2008 His novels include the National Book Award–winning "Dog Soldiers" (1974), and the PEN/Faulkner Award–winning "A Flag for Sunrise" (1981).

Background

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 [ [http://www.salon.com/april97/stone2970414.html Salon | The Salon Interview: Robert Stone, page 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. [ [http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/05/books/05ston.html Counterculture Lion, Back in His Tidy Jungle, "New York Times", January 5, 2007] ] 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. [Stone, Robert: "Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties", pages 121-22. HarperCollins, 2007]

Career

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 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.

His second novel, "Dog Soldiers" (1974), was a thriller of sorts about a journalist smuggling heroin from Vietnam (where Stone had briefly travelled as a war correspondent in 1971). It won the 1975 National Book Award, and was also adapted into a film, "Who'll Stop the Rain".

"A Flag for Sunrise" (1981) further developed Stone's trademark bleakness, portraying a fictional Central American country in which U.S.-backed forces commit atrocities to suppress a Marxist revolution; it won a PEN/Faulkner Award. His next two novels focused on smaller-scale conflicts: the psychotic breakdown of a movie actress in "Children of Light" (Stone's least critically successful novel), 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.

Non-fiction

"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 as well as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. 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"
* 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: ""

Notes

External links

* [http://www.brassland.org/ahb/writing/archives/2007/01/stone_warm_sobe.html Interview with Robert Stone after publication of his memoir Prime Green]
* [http://wiredforbooks.org/robertstone/ Audio Interviews with Robert Stone - RealAudio at Wired for Books.org by Don Swaim]
* [http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060612fa_fact1 "Antarctica, 1958"] by Robert Stone, "The New Yorker" (June 12, 2006).
* [http://www.salon.com/april97/stone970414.html "The Apostle of the Strung-Out"] (Interview), "Salon" (April 14, 1997).
* [http://www.bookforum.com/archive/sum_03/interview_stone.html "Kera Bolonik Talks to Robert Stone"] (Interview) "Bookforum" (Summer 2003).
* [http://www.nypl.org/research/chss/spe/rbk/faids/stone.html#bio New York Public Library Bio of Stone.]