Stone, Robert 1937–

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Stone, Robert 1937–

(Robert Anthony Stone)

PERSONAL:

Born August 21, 1937, in New York, NY; son of C. Homer and Gladys Catherine (a teacher) Stone; married Janice G. Burr, December 11, 1959; children: Deidre M., Ian A. Education: Attended New York University, 1958-60, and Stanford University, 1962-64. Hobbies and other interests: Scuba diving, acting.

ADDRESSES:

Agent—Neal Olson, Donadio & Olson, 121 W. 27th St., New York, NY 10001.

CAREER:

Novelist and screenwriter. New York Daily News, New York, NY, copyboy and caption writer, 1958-60; worked at various jobs, 1960-62, in a coffee factory, as an actor in New Orleans, LA, and as an advertising copywriter in New York City; National Mirror, New York, NY, writer, 1965-67; freelance writer in London, Hollywood, and Saigon, South Vietnam (now Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam), 1967-71; Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, writer-in-residence, 1971-72, faculty member, 1985 and 1986; Amherst College, Amherst, MA, associate professor of English, 1972-75, writer-in-residence, 1977-78; faculty member at Stanford University, 1979, University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1979-80, Harvard University, 1981, University of California, Irvine, 1982, New York University, 1983-84, University of California, San Diego, 1985, Johns Hopkins University, 1993, and Yale University, 1994. Directed the documentary film Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst, Magnolia Pictures, 2004. Military service: U.S. Navy, 1955-58; served in amphibious force of the Atlantic Fleet and as senior enlisted journalist on Operation Deep Freeze Three in Antarctica; became petty officer third class.

MEMBER:

PEN (member of executive board), Authors League of America, Authors Guild, Writers Guild of America, West.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Wallace Stegner fellowship, Stanford University, 1962-64; Houghton-Mifflin literary fellowship, 1967, and William Faulkner Foundation Award for notable first novel, 1968, both for A Hall of Mirrors; Guggenheim fellowship, 1971; National Book Award, 1975, for Dog Soldiers; nomination for best script adapted from another medium, Writers Guild of America, 1979, for "Who'll Stop the Rain"; Los Angeles Times Book Prize, 1982, for A Flag for Sunrise; nominations for American Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and PEN/Faulkner Award, and runner-up for Pulitzer Prize in fiction, all 1982, all for A Flag for Sunrise; American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award, 1982; John Dos Passos Prize for literature, 1982; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 1983; corecipient of Harold and Mildred Strauss Livings award, 1988; grant from National Institute of Arts and Letters.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

A Hall of Mirrors, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1967.

Dog Soldiers, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1974.

A Flag for Sunrise, Knopf (New York, NY), 1981.

Children of Light, Knopf (New York, NY), 1986.

Outerbridge Reach, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London, England), 1989, Ticknor & Fields (New York, NY), 1992.

Damascus Gate, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1998.

Bay of Souls, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 2003.

SCREENPLAYS

WUSA (based on his novel A Hall of Mirrors), Paramount, 1970.

(With Judith Roscoe) Who'll Stop the Rain (based on his novel Dog Soldiers), United Artists, 1978.

OTHER

Day Hikes in Aspen, Colorado (photographs), Day Hike Books (Red Lodge, MT), 1996.

Bear and His Daughter: Stories, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1997.

Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties, Ecco (New York, NY), 2007.

CONTRIBUTOR

Richard Scowcroft and Wallace Stegner, editors, Twenty Years of Stanford Short Stories, Stanford University Press (Stanford, CA), 1966.

New American Review 6, New American Library (New York, NY), 1969.

David Burnett and Martha Foley, editors, Best American Short Stories, 1970, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1970.

James B. Hall and Elizabeth Hall, editors, The Realm of Fiction: Seventy-four Short Stories, McGraw-Hill (New York, NY), 1977.

Theodore Solotaroff, editor, American Review 26, Bantam (New York, NY), 1977.

William O'Rourke, editor, On the Job: Fiction about Work by Contemporary American Writers, Vintage (New York, NY), 1977.

Rust Hills and Tom Jenks, editors, Esquire Fiction Reader, Volume 1, Wampeter (Key West, FL), 1985.

Images of War (nonfiction), Boston Publishing (Boston, MA), 1986.

(Photographs, author of introduction) Deeds of War, Thames and Hudson (New York, NY), 1989.

(Author of introduction) The Stories of Paul Bowles, Ecco (New York, NY), 2001.

Contributor of articles and reviews to periodicals, including Atlantic, Harper's, Life, New York Times Book Review, London Guardian, and TriQuarterly. Also contributor to Who We Are, a collection of articles on aspects of the war in Vietnam.

SIDELIGHTS:

With his first four novels, Robert Stone established himself as one of America's most stringent political voices and an artist of considerable caliber. His books, many critics acknowledge, are not for everyone. A typical Stone protagonist is a down-and-out, cynical drifter engrossed in the drug culture or otherwise at odds with the law. Stone's stories have taken readers to the bowels of society, from the underbelly of New Orleans to the jungles of Vietnam, from the brutality of war-torn Central America to the artificial glamour of Hollywood. In this way the author is often compared to Graham Greene, Joseph Conrad, John Dos Passos, and Nathanael West, but Stone's individuality ultimately distinguishes him as "the apostle of strung out," according to New York Times Book Review critic Jean Strouse.

Stone has earned that epithet. A native of Brooklyn, New York, and a product of Catholic school upbringing, the young man started his career in the 1950s as a newspaper copyboy, but soon Stone and his wife dropped their conventional life to see America. "They got as far as New Orleans, where they both worked at a variety of menial jobs that never lifted them above the poverty level," reported Sybil Steinberg in Publishers Weekly. Finally, the Stones, joined by a daughter born in a charity hospital, returned to New York City. There the author joined the emerging bohemian scene, counting Jack Kerouac among his confederates, and the group's dedication to discovery took them to northern California and Ken Kesey.

Stone's days in Louisiana undoubtedly provided him with the background material for his first novel, A Hall of Mirrors. While this story of a young man's encounter with class politics is set in New Orleans, the book is really about all of America, as several reviewers have suggested. "The unspoken theme of A Hall of Mirrors is the relation between the prosperous official society and its necessary underworld of drop-outs and cast-offs," noted Commonweal critic Emile Capouya. "These parallel systems meet in the persons of two characters. One is the millionaire demagogue, who wants to get more power than he already has by exploiting the fears of the poor white trash. The other is Rheinhardt, the pattern of the available ‘intellectual,’ the disabused journeyman liar of the communications industries." The communications industry in question is WSA, a right-wing propagandist radio station that Rheinhardt infiltrates. The author's "breadth of mind and … seriousness [set] him apart from any number of merely talented writers, for he instinctively makes the connection between the accidents of his fable and the world of his readers' experience," wrote Capouya, adding that Rheinhardt is "[Albert] Camus' Stranger in a less abstract, less absolute form."

"Stone's language is a joy," declared Ian Gold in his New York Times Book Review contribution on A Hall of Mirrors. "Rich yet unobtrusive, self-effacing but in complete control—here is a growing sense of awe, once one has finished the book, at what the effort must have cost him. When so accomplished a style is joined to an ear which encompasses the dictions of hippies, and senators, and a good portion of the worlds in between; which seems incapable of producing or reproducing a line of dialogue which does not ring true, it takes an act of willfulness on the part of the reader not to be drawn in, and moved, and altered."

The serious scholarly attention accorded Stone's first novel was summed up in the words of L. Hugh Moore, who wrote in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction: "Stone's vision of the modern world and society is a profoundly pessimistic one. The implications of his main, related metaphors—the undersea world and evolution—are, indeed, disturbing. To see the world as an environment, an ecological system, that is as cold, hostile, and brutal as the sea floor is hardly new. Nor is his view of his characters as denizens of the deep profoundly original. What disturbs and what makes the novel contemporarily relevant is the fact that Stone offers no melioristic possibility. To survive in the new ice age is immoral; neither work, bitter humor, nor withdrawal is humanly possible. ‘Despair and die’ is the final message of the novel."

Suspenseful, convincing, cruel, funny and frightening are just some of the words critics used to describe Stone's next novel, the 1975 National Book Award-winning Dog Soldiers. Like A Hall of Mirrors, this book exposes corruption and greed, this time in settings ranging from Saigon to California. During the waning days of the Vietnam War, journalist John Converse, stationed in Saigon, gets an offer he cannot refuse: If he smuggles three kilograms of pure heroin back to the States, he will earn forty thousand dollars. Engaging an accomplice, Ray Hicks, into the scheme, Converse manages to get the package to California and to leave it in the possession of his wife, Marge. "The stark evil in this plan quickly flows into nightmare," Time contributor Paul Gray wrote, as agents for a corrupt federal officer pursue Converse and his cohorts.

Dog Soldiers "is more than a white-knuckled plot; it is a harrowing allegory," continued Gray. "The novice smugglers evade a sense of their own villainy through sophistry or indifference. Converse rationalizes that in a world capable of producing the horrors of war, ‘people are just naturally going to want to get high.’" New York Review of Books critic Roger Sale took a different view. "The more seriously Stone takes his characters, the more carefully he brings their aimlessness to a decision, the more he eventually either jettisons the aimlessness or falsifies the decisiveness and its importance. I'm not sure how he could better have pondered his materials and his wonderful first half, but the remainder is good writing that seems divorced from a wider purpose than its own existence, and so seems just like writing."

Despite his reservations, however, Sale concluded that Dog Soldiers ultimately shows the author's "clear eye for detail and clear-eyed determination to see these lives through to some end without sentimentalizing them. Throughout, thus, his integrity gives us a sense of learning at first hand what most of us have known only as hearsay or freakout. He brings the news, as novelists are supposed to do; he makes one think we have only begun to understand our immediate past." And a Washington Post Book World reviewer, labeling Dog Soldiers the most important novel of the year, added that "Stone writes like a Graham Greene whose God is utterly dead, and he favors the same sort of setting, the same juxtaposition of the exotic and the banal."

Stone's third novel, A Flag for Sunrise, "is about Catholics—a nun, a priest, an anthropologist, a drifter—caught up among spies, gun runners, murderers, maniacs, and revolutionaries in a poor Central American country ruled by American business interests and the CIA through a local military regime," summarized Leonard Michaels in the Saturday Review. "The plot is complicated and built upon short scenes, some of them so intensely dramatic they could be published independently. What holds them together is suspenseful action, an atmosphere of neurasthenic menace, and Stone's prose style. Lean, tough, quick, and smart, it is perfect for violent action, yet lyrical enough for Stone's nun as she contemplates her own mind, her ‘inward place.’"

To Los Angeles Times Book Review writer Carolyn See, Stone "does American imperialism so well it is possible to read his third novel as a purely aesthetic experience. The decay is so attractive, so muted, so ‘literary,’ that reading it is … like curling up with Graham Greene in Africa or Joseph Conrad in the deep Pacific." William Logan found distinct ties between the author's first and third books. A Flag for Sunrise, he noted in the Chicago Tribune Books, "so carefully duplicates the structure of A Hall of Mirrors, even to the rhythm of its title. In each, the narration emanated from three characters whose careless intertwinings led to a cataclysm only one escaped alive."

Commonweal critic Frank McConnell called A Flag for Sunrise "an important political novel precisely because it is such a perceptive religious novel." Further, Stone offers "an indication of a new trend in the American sensibility. For Conrad, Greene, and [John] LeCarre can be considered the elegists of Britain's dreams of empire and the explorers of that vaster, richer territory of the spirit that lies beyond the hope of triumph over history. Robert Stone is the first American writer I know of who shares that melancholy, that maturity, and that bitter sanity. And if his novel is fierce in its despair, it is even fiercer in its unvoiced suggestion of a sensibility that renders despair itself mute before the absurd, unending possibility of love." "Flag is a disturbing book in many ways, some of them not intended," wrote Richard Poirier, in the New York Review of Books, who added that he is "not referring to Stone's politics as such but to the degree to which they may reveal more about his opportunism as a novelist than about his anxieties as a citizen."

Stone's first two novels were made into feature films. While he contributed to both screenplays, WUSA, based on A Hall of Mirrors, and Who'll Stop the Rain, based on Dog Soldiers, are remarkable for the unfavorable responses both received from film critics and audiences. Many factors go into the fate of a film, however—the work of the director, cast, crew and production company included—and Stone has stated in interviews that the finished products were never even close to the screen treatments he had originally conceived. Still, his experiences in film provided the author with the impetus for his fourth novel, Children of Light.

Set on the location of a film, Children of Light chronicles the wasted days of a washed-up screenwriter and a schizophrenic actress; the novel offers "a fine, complex, often funny tale, full of lights and shadows, with great dialogue and a sharp sense of character and place," according to Jean Strouse in the New York Times Book Review. The book "is jam-packed with people pretending to be other than they are, people with masks, people who have become their lies. Even the film location, Mexico pretending to be Louisiana, is schizoid. The only sane person is the mad one, [the actress] Lee Verger," noted Washington Post Book World critic Stephen Dobyns. Again, Stone's dialogue won wide praise. Not only does the author's language "snap like a bullwhip," wrote Toronto Globe and Mail reviewer Norman Snider, but the author, "having paid hard dues in Hollywood, has an acute sense of how the patois of the film biz equally encompasses relationships as well as professional arrangements. [A character's] husband, for instance, ‘takes a walk’ out of the marriage in exactly the same way performers or directors would walk off a film they suspect will damage their career."

Children of Light "seems far more slanted than anything Stone has written before," wrote A. Alvarez in the New York Review of Books. "He has always kept apart from the current fashion that confuses fiction with the art of the self and is suspicious of anyone with a strong gift for narrative. Stone, who has a strong imaginative grip on the contemporary American scene and writes like an angel—a fallen, hard-driving angel—is also a marvelous storyteller. He does not take sides and is as much at one with Pablo, the murderous speed freak, as he is with Holliwell, the liberal intellectual," wrote Alvarez. The critic summed up that in order for the author to reach his own level of truth, "he has sacrificed the intricate, gallows-humor detachment that has made him, in his previous books, one of the most impressive novelists of his generation."

Vietnam echoes in Stone's novel Outerbridge Reach. It is the tale of a Vietnam veteran, Owen Browne, who works for a yacht brokerage. When his boss is forced to withdraw from a solo around-the-world yacht race due to financial problems, Browne volunteers to take his place. Also figuring in the plot are Browne's wife Anne and a filmmaker, Ron. The book is based on an actual event in which an Englishman, Donald Crowhurst, faked an around-the-world voyage, went insane, and likely committed suicide. Several critics found the story and Stone's writing compelling. New York Times reviewer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote: "The true appeal of reading Outerbridge Reach lies in the texture of its prose and the harsh realism of its characters." Commenting on Stone's "fascination" with pain, John Casey wrote in the Chicago Tribune Books, Stone "has a fascinated, almost Mayan, relation to it." He continued: "That characteristic made me recoil from the end of A Flag for Sunrise and, to a lesser extent, from a part of Outerbridge Reach. I don't know whether I recoil because I see life more hopefully than Stone does or because I can't help admiring the style, design and allure of his version of how powerful the vortex is, both outside us and in us."

Stone's 1997 Bear and His Daughter: Stories is a collection of short stories, many of which were previously published in periodicals including the New Yorker, Harper's, and American Review. "The older stories are in no way inferior," argued Margot Livesey in the Boston Book Review online. Livesey compared the collection to those of such literary luminaries as James Joyce and Flannery O'Connor. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt maintained in the New York Times Book Review that, compared with novel-length works, Stone's "dark vision is better suited to short fiction. In thrall to this dark vision, the reader wishes only that Mr. Stone's characters will survive with some small fragment of hope." Livesey went quite a bit further, concluding: "Bear and His Daughter is a beautiful and necessary book. To read it could save your life."

Stone returned to the novel form with the 1998 publication Damascus Gate. The work "has a number of elements which will be familiar to Robert Stone's readers: drugs, alcohol, the threat of violence, death, and characters searching desperately for a meaning that eludes them," commented John Garvey in Commonweal. Set in Jerusalem, the novel follows journalist Christopher Lucas, who is writing about the "Jerusalem Syndrome," a reportedly delusional breakdown that certain individuals suffer upon visiting the city. "What follows is a religious thriller," summarized Hillel Halkin in the New Republic. "Stone's characters … all become inexorably tangled in the obsessive journey of Adam De Kuff, a manic-depressive from New Orleans who believes he is the Messiah," wrote J.D. Reed in People.

Critical reaction to the novel was largely positive. "Stone's fascination with moral collisions and pirouettes shines through Damascus Gate, and the rewards, sentence by sentence, are frequent," found Todd Gitlin in the Nation. "All seekers of Revelation and jihad will be equally offended—no small tribute." Halkin, who compared Stone's style to those of Hemingway, Conrad, and Joyce, felt differently, calling the work "really a rip-off of a country and a tradition that deserve better at his hands." James Gardner, in the National Review, had an opposing view: "Stone reveals himself to be both learned and shrewd. Whether his subject is the syncretic kabbalism of Pico della Mirandola, the music of Fats Waller, or cigarette consumption in an Israeli bar, he always gets it right, knowing just enough more than his reader to have something worth telling him, but incorporating this knowledge so seamlessly into the fabric of his work that is never irksome." Garvey concluded: "Stone shows how close and at the same time how far apart are the worlds of the nihilist and the genuine believer. And if you feel uncomfortable with the ideas that crop up here, read the book as a great thriller. It works wonderfully at both levels."

Stone's next novel, Bay of Souls, traces the downward spiral of Michael Ahearn, a Minnesota university professor who nearly throws away his marriage, family, and career in the face of his obsession with a new, exotic professor, Lara Parcell. He goes so far as to follow her when she returns to her remote island home in the Caribbean, supposedly to assist with a diving expedition, and nearly gets killed in an attempt to dive for contraband sunk off the coast. When he returns home, he struggles to avoid a divorce and ponders the effects of his romantic obsession. Robert E. Brown, writing for Library Journal, observed that "Stone … is at his best here, and that's very, very good," while a contributor for Kirkus Reviews declared the book to be "a small masterpiece, possessed of a relentless lucidity that recalls Conrad and Graham Greene at their peaks. Stone's best yet." A reviewer for Publishers Weekly remarked: "This is a novel of bold prose and subtle perceptions, a small, hard gem from a master writer."

Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties is a memoir in which Stone recounts his experiences during the decade, including his friendship with the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Ken Kesey, and his experiments with the drug culture and politics of the time. In an interview with Harvey Blume for the Boston Globe Online, Stone remarked upon his use of drugs during the 1960s, and his ultimate decision to move past them: "There's no way around the role drugs played, the driving force they were. Finally they became an utterly outsized element and kind of destroyed everything. They created a mass youth culture, which was not a good thing." Stone credits his writing for enabling him to maintain his equilibrium and his ability to function despite his participation in the culture of the day. He told Blume: "Without writing I would have dried up and blown away. That was my discipline, what I lived for, finally. I never had a lot of ego. It got crushed when I was small. Writing was the one thing I had that was beautiful, the only thing that justified me, the only way in which I could provide something beyond my own gratification." Writing for the New York Times Book Review Online, Walter Kirn observed of Stone: "Erudite but blunt, both tender and hard-boiled, the part-time tabloid hack turned novelist knows how to stick a sentence. He knows how to fly down the high road of ideas, then suddenly crank the steering wheel of style and take us for a tough ride along the ditches. He's great on people—on joining their abstract insides to their outsides—and he's even better on places." A reviewer for Publishers Weekly, acknowledging the value of the book as both a chronicle of the time and of the people Stone knew, noted it is also "a funny, entertaining picaresque."

In a 1981 Washington Post interview, Stone explained his reasons for telling the stories he does: He believes that by exposing readers to the darker side of society, he is abetting "the awareness of ironies and continuities, showing people that being decent is really hard and that we carry within ourselves our own worst enemy."

Stone once told CA that the combination of teaching college English courses at various universities and writing books "works rather well. It tends to give the week a certain kind of shape, and it doesn't hurt to talk about writing, because it helps me find out what I believe about writing. The great thing about writing courses is that even if you can't teach anybody to write—which you certainly can't—you get to talk about everything. Writing courses are really more the philosophy of composition than they are anything else. You can't teach people how to write, but you can talk about life, about how it is, how people are. That's not a bad way to pass a couple of hours."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 5, 1976, Volume 23, 1983, Volume 42, 1987.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 152: American Novelists since World War II, Fourth Series, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1995.

Lopez, Ken, with Bev Chaney, Robert Stone: A Bibliography, Numinous Press (Hadley, MA), 1992.

Solotaroff, Robert, Robert Stone, Twayne (New York, NY), 1994.

Stone, Robert, Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties, Ecco (New York, NY), 2007.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, February 15, 1998, Bill Ott, review of Damascus Gate, p. 949; January 1, 1999, review of Damascus Gate, p. 780.

Commonweal, April 5, 1968, Emile Capouya, review of A Hall of Mirrors, p. 79; March 12, 1982, Frank McConnell, review of A Flag for Sunrise, p. 153; June 5, 1998, John Garvey, review of Damascus Gate, p. 24.

Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, Volume 15, number 3, 1969, L. Hugh Moore, review of A Hall of Mirrors.

Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), April 26, 1986, Norman Snider, review of Children of Light.

Kirkus Reviews, January 1, 2003, review of Bay of Souls, p. 24.

Library Journal, March 15, 1998, Lawrence Rungren, review of Damascus Gate, p. 96; March 15, 2003, Robert E. Brown, review of Bay of Souls, p. 117.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, November 8, 1981, Carolyn See, review of A Flag for Sunrise.

Nation, May 11, 1998, Todd Gitlin, review of Damascus Gate, p. 50.

National Review, June 2, 1998, James Gardner, review of Damascus Gate, p. 53.

New Republic, May 25, 1998, Hillel Halkin, review of Damascus Gate, p. 29.

New York Review of Books, April 3, 1975, Roger Sale, review of Dog Soldiers, p. 9; December 3, 1981, Richard Poirier, review of A Flag for Sunrise; April 10, 1986, A. Alvarez, review of Children of Light, p. 23.

New York Times, February 17, 1992, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of Outerbridge Reach, pp. B2, C18.

New York Times Book Review, October 18, 1981, Ian Gold, review of A Hall of Mirrors; March 13, 1986, Jean Strouse, review of Children of Light, p. 1; April 3, 1997, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of Bear and His Daughter: Stories.

People, May 18, 1998, J.D. Reed, review of Damascus Gate, p. 45.

Publishers Weekly, January 24, 1986, Sybil Steinberg, review of Children of Light, p. 62; February 16, 1998, review of Damascus Gate, p. 200; February 17, 2003, review of Bay of Souls, p. 55; October 9, 2006, review of Prime Green, p. 45.

Saturday Review, November, 1981, Leonard Michaels, review of A Flag for Sunrise.

Tikkun, September-October, 1998, John Leonard, review of Damascus Gate, p. 71.

Time, November 11, 1974, Paul Gray, review of Dog Soldiers, p. 111.

Tribune Books, (Chicago, IL), October 25, 1981, William Logan, review of A Flag for Sunrise; March 1, 1992, John Casey, review of Outerbridge Reach, p. 1.

Washington Post, November 15, 1981, interview with Robert Stone.

Washington Post Book World, December 8, 1974, review of Dog Soldiers; March 23, 1986, Stephen Dobyns, review of Children of Light, p. 1.