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Death of the Black-Haired Girl (2013) Signed First Edition Reference

Approx. 2 min read · 4 May 2026

Death of the Black-Haired Girl is Robert Stone’s seventh and final novel, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2013, two years before his death. Set at a New England university resembling Yale (where Stone taught for years), it follows Steven Brookman, a creative writing professor, whose affair with Maud Stack, a brilliant, volatile student, ends in her death and triggers a reckoning that implicates the university, the Catholic Church, and Brookman’s own conscience.

The Novel

The campus novel is an unusual setting for Stone, whose fiction had previously ranged across Vietnam, Central America, the Caribbean, and Jerusalem. But the campus provides a microcosm of his persistent themes: self-deception, moral evasion, the gap between public respectability and private corruption. Brookman is a characteristic Stone protagonist — intelligent enough to understand his failings, weak enough to commit them anyway.

Maud Stack is one of Stone’s most vivid creations: a fierce, idealistic young woman whose Catholicism, feminism, and romantic intensity make her simultaneously admirable and dangerous. Her death — and the question of Brookman’s responsibility — drives a compressed, morally urgent narrative that reads like Stone’s reckoning with the academic world that had sustained him for decades.

Reviews were respectful, recognizing the novel as the work of a master operating in a minor key but with undiminished skill. Stone’s death in 2015 made this his final statement, giving the book additional retrospective weight.

First Edition Identification

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston Publication date: 2013 Copyright page: First printing per HMH convention

Signed Copy Market Values

Signed first edition, fine/fine: $50–$150
Inscribed copies: $75–$200
Unsigned first edition, fine/fine: $10–$25

As Stone’s final novel, signed copies carry the valedictory premium common to an author’s last works. The narrow window between publication and Stone’s death (two years) means signed copies, while available, have finite supply.

Collecting Notes

Death of the Black-Haired Girl completes a Stone collection. Its campus setting provides an interesting counterpoint to the exotic locales of Stone’s earlier novels, and its themes of moral reckoning and self-destruction echo through his entire body of work. An affordable and meaningful acquisition.