Robert Stone
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| Robert Stone | |
|---|---|
| Born | August 21, 1937 Brooklyn, New York, United States |
| Occupation | Author, journalist |
| Notable work(s) | Dog Soldiers |
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Influences
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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.[citation needed] His novels include the National Book Award–winning Dog Soldiers (1974), and the PEN/Faulkner Award–winning A Flag for Sunrise (1981).
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[edit] 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[1], 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.[2] 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.[3]
[edit] Career
[edit] Fiction
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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.
[edit] Non-fiction
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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.
[edit] 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: Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties
[edit] Notes
- ^ Salon | The Salon Interview: Robert Stone, page 2
- ^ Counterculture Lion, Back in His Tidy Jungle, New York Times, January 5, 2007
- ^ Stone, Robert: "Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties", pages 121-22. HarperCollins, 2007
[edit] External links
- Interview with Robert Stone after publication of his memoir Prime Green
- Audio Interviews with Robert Stone - RealAudio at Wired for Books.org by Don Swaim
- "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).
- New York Public Library Bio of Stone.
