A short life of the author
Robert Anthony Stone (1937–2015) was born on 21 August 1937 in Brooklyn, New York. His mother was schizophrenic; he never knew his father. He was raised in institutions and on the streets of Manhattan, dropped out of high school, and served in the United States Navy. After the Navy, he attended New York University on the GI Bill and then studied at Stanford on a Stegner Fellowship, where he fell in with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters — a connection that immersed him in the drug culture and counter-cultural ferment of early 1960s California.
Life and Career
A Hall of Mirrors (1967), his debut, is set in New Orleans and follows a drifter, a social worker, and a radio demagogue through a landscape of racial tension and political corruption. It won the William Faulkner Foundation Award and was adapted into the film WUSA (1970) starring Paul Newman.
Dog Soldiers (1974) is his masterwork. A journalist in Saigon ships a load of heroin back to California, setting off a nightmarish chase across the American West. The novel — which won the National Book Award — captured the moral collapse of the Vietnam era better than any other American novel: the war’s corruption bleeding into domestic life, idealism curdling into criminality.
A Flag for Sunrise (1981) is set in a fictional Central American country during a revolution and examines the intersection of American idealism, CIA intervention, and Catholic liberation theology. Children of Light (1986) takes place in the Hollywood film industry. Outerbridge Reach (1992) — based loosely on the Donald Crowhurst sailing fraud — is a novel about a man who fakes a solo circumnavigation and the woman who discovers his deception. Damascus Gate (1998) is set in Jerusalem among religious seekers and fanatics.
Bear and His Daughter (1997), a story collection, is his finest short fiction.
Stone died on 10 January 2015.
Major Works and Themes
Stone’s fiction is driven by a single great theme: what happens to Americans when they leave the safety of their illusions and confront the actual world — violent, corrupt, morally unintelligible. His protagonists are typically men of failed idealism — journalists, soldiers, actors, sailors — who find themselves in situations of extreme moral danger.
His prose is dense, muscular, and dark, with a gift for dialogue that captures the particular rhetoric of self-deception.
Dog Soldiers (1974) is the essential Stone novel — the Vietnam war brought home as a drug nightmare.
Critical Reception and Legacy
Stone is one of the most respected and least-read major American novelists of the postwar era. He belongs in the company of Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, and Joan Didion as a chronicler of American darkness.
Key Works
- A Hall of Mirrors (1967)
- Dog Soldiers (1974)
- A Flag for Sunrise (1981)
- Children of Light (1986)
- Outerbridge Reach (1992)
- Bear and His Daughter (1997)
- Damascus Gate (1998)
- Bay of Souls (2003)
Collecting Stone
A Hall of Mirrors (1967, Houghton Mifflin, Boston) — the debut — had a small first printing. Fine copies in jacket bring $200–$600.
Dog Soldiers (1974, Houghton Mifflin) — the National Book Award winner — is the primary collectible at $200–$800 for fine first editions.
A Flag for Sunrise (1981, Knopf) and Outerbridge Reach (1992, Ticknor & Fields) are available at $50–$200.
Stone signed infrequently. Signed copies of the major titles command significant premiums.