Robert Stone | |
|---|---|
 Stone at the 2010 Texas Book Festival | |
| Born | Robert Anthony Stone (1937-08-21)August 21, 1937 Brooklyn, New York, U.S. |
| Died | January 10, 2015(2015-01-10) (aged 77) |
| Occupation | Author, journalist |
| Education | New York University |
| Literary movement | Naturalism,Stream of consciousness |
| Notable works | Dog Soldiers,A Flag for Sunrise,Outerbridge Reach[1] |
| Notable awards | National Book Award 1975 |
Robert Anthony Stone (August 21, 1937 – January 10, 2015) was an American novelist, journalist, and college professor.
He was five times a finalist for theNational Book Award for Fiction,[2] which he did receive in 1975 for his novelDog Soldiers.[3][4]Time magazine included this novel in its list100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.[5] Stone was also twice a finalist for thePulitzer Prize and once for thePEN/Faulkner Award.[6][7][8][9]
During his lifetime Stone received material support and recognition including Guggenheim[10] andNational Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, the five-yearMildred and Harold Strauss Living Award, theJohn Dos Passos Prize for Literature, and theAmerican Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award. Stone also offered his own support and recognition of writers during his lifetime, serving as Chairman of thePEN/Faulkner Foundation Board of Directors for over thirty years.[11]
Stone's best-known work is characterized byaction-tinged adventures, political concerns anddark humor. Many of his novels are set in unusual, exotic landscapes of raging social turbulence, such as theVietnam War; a post-coup violentbanana republic in Central America;Jim Crow-eraNew Orleans, andJerusalem on the verge of themillennium.[12]
Stone was born inBrooklyn, New York on August 21, 1937 to Homer Stone, who worked for theNew Haven Railroad, and Gladys Grant, a teacher.[13] Stone's parents separated when he was an infant. Stone came from a "family of Scottish Presbyterians and Irish Catholics who made their living as tugboat workers in New York harbor".[14] Until the age of six he was raised primarily by his mother, who suffered fromschizophrenia; after she was institutionalized, he spent several years in a Catholicorphanage. In his short story "Absence of Mercy", which Stone 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".[15]
Stone was expelled from aMarist high school during his senior year[16] for "drinking too much beer and being 'militantly atheistic'".[14] Soon afterwards, Stone joined theNavy for four years. At sea he traveled to many locales, includingAntarctica andEgypt. But according to Stone, it was his first shore leave in a pre-Fidel Castro eraHavana,Cuba that impacted his future writing:
"Havana was my first liberty port, my first foreign city. It was 1955 and I was 17, a radio operator with an amphibious assault force in the U.S. Navy ... At the time, I was struck less by the frivolity of Havana than by its unashamed seriousness ... All this Spanish tragedy, leavened withCreole sensuality, made Havana irresistible. Whether or not I got it right, I have used the film of its memory ever since in turning real cities into imaginary ones."[14]
In the early 1960s, he briefly attendedNew York University; worked as acopy boy at theNew York Daily News; married and moved toNew Orleans; and held theStegner Fellowship (1962-1963) at theStanford University Creative Writing Center, where he began writing a novel. Although he associated with the influential post-Beat Generation writerKen Kesey and otherMerry Pranksters, he was not a passenger on the famous 1964 bus trip to New York, contrary to some media reports.[17] 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 dyspepticJack Kerouac.[18]
Although he never completed an academic degree, Stone taught in the creative writing programs at various university programs around the United States. He held a lectureship at theJohns Hopkins University Writing Seminars during the 1993–1994 academic year before moving toYale University. He taught creative writing for the academic year 2006–2007 atBeloit College. For the 2010–2011 academic year, Stone held an endowed chair in the English department atTexas State University. He was also active in many of the writing seminars in and around Key West, Florida[14] where he resided during the winter months.[16] Stone was appointed an honorary director of theKey West Literary Seminar serving in that capacity during the final decade of his life.[19]
Stone was a heavy smoker, but quit in his 40s. However, at age 72, just after the publication of his second short-story collectionFun With Problems, Stone admitted that he suffered from severeemphysema: "It's my punishment for chain-smoking," he says. He recalled his reaction to being told of the harm smoking was now causing him in old age: "I'm not going to know I'm alive!".[20]
According to his literary agent, Neil Olson,[21] Stone died fromchronic obstructive pulmonary disease on January 10, 2015, in Key West,[22] where he and his wife had spent their winters for more than twenty years. He was 77.[23] At the time of his death, Stone was survived by his wife of 55 years, Janice, and their two adult-age children, a daughter named Deirdre and a son named Ian.[16][24]
During his lifetime, Robert Stone published eight novels, two story collections, and a memoir,Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties.[25] Since his death, a book of collected nonfiction has appeared, and a volume of his work (reprinting togetherDog Soldiers,A Flag For Sunrise, andOuterbridge Reach) has been included in the aclaimedLibrary of America series.
Stone's first novel,A Hall of Mirrors, appeared in 1967.[26] It won both aHoughton Mifflin Literary Fellowship, and aWilliam Faulkner Foundation Award for best first novel. Set inNew Orleans in 1960 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 earliersocial realists: alternating betweennaturalism andstream of consciousness. It wasadapted as a film,WUSA (1970) based on Stone's screenplay of his own novel.[27] The novel's success led to aGuggenheim Fellowship and began Stone's career as a professional writer.
In 1971 he traveled to Vietnam as acorrespondent for an obscure British journal calledINK.[28] His time there served as the inspiration for his second novel,Dog Soldiers (1974), which features a journalist smuggling heroin fromVietnam. It shared the 1975 U.S.National Book Award withThe Hair of Harold Roux byThomas Williams.[3][29]Dog Soldiers was adapted into the filmWho'll Stop the Rain (1978) starringNick Nolte, from a script that Stone co-wrote.[30]
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 fictionalizedbanana republic based onNicaragua. The novel was a finalist for thePEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and thePulitzer Prize.[6][8]A Flag for Sunrise was twice a finalist for theNational Book Award, once following its hardcover release and again the next year when it was reissued in paperback.[31][32]
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 inChildren of Light, and an eccentric at the midst of acircumnavigation race inOuterbridge Reach (based loosely on the story ofDonald Crowhurst), published in 1986 and 1992 respectively. The latter was a finalist for the National Book Award for 1992.[33]Bear and His Daughter, published in 1997, is a short story collection. It was a finalist for thePulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1998.[7]
Stone returned to the complexpolitical novel withDamascus Gate (1998), about a man withmessianic delusions caught up in a terrorist plot inJerusalem. The novel was a finalist for the National Book Award for 1998.[34] It was followed in 2003 byBay of Souls. The final novel that Stone published in his lifetime wasDeath of the Black-Haired Girl which appeared in 2013.[35]
Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties (2007) is Stone's memoir discussing his experiences in the 1960scounterculture.[23] "Pleasant goofing" was the way Stone described those days in aWashington Post interview from 1981.[14] This 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 onNeal Cassady,Allen Ginsberg, andJack Kerouac from his time spent traveling with them.[36]Prime Green also gives us Stone's perspective on drugs and their effects. Following his death in 2015, a critic noted, in a snapshot retrospective view of Stone's career, that "even his experiments with drugs in the early sixties led Stone to understand that his view on life is going to remain religious no matter what."[12] And Stone himself confirmed this view, when he told theWashington Post in 1981:
But through his experimentation with drugs in the early 1960s, [Stone] has said, he confronted a deep religious sensibility. "I discovered that my way of seeing the world was always going to be religious — not intellectual or political — viewing everything as a mystic process."[14]
Novels
Short Story Collections
Memoir
Screenplays
Nonfiction
