The first and definitive biography of one of the great American
novelists of the postwar era, the author of Dog Soldiers and A Flag
for Sunrise, and a penetrating critic of American power, innocence, and
corruption
Robert Stone (1937-2015), probably the only postwar American writer to
draw favorable comparisons to Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, and
Joseph Conrad, lived a life rich in adventure, achievement, and inner
turmoil. He grew up rough on the streets of New York, the son of a
mentally troubled single mother. After his Navy service in the fifties,
which brought him to such locales as pre-Castro Havana, the Suez Crisis,
and Antarctica, he studied writing at Stanford, where he met Ken Kesey
and became a core member of the gang of Merry Pranksters. The
publication of his superb New Orleans novel*, Hall of Mirrors* (1967),
initiated a succession of dark-humored novels that investigated the
American experience in Vietnam (Dog Soldiers, 1974, which won the
National Book Award), Central America (A Flag for Sunrise, 1981), and
Jerusalem on the eve of the millennium (Damascus Gate, 1998).
An acclaimed novelist himself, Madison Smartt Bell was a close friend
and longtime admirer of Robert Stone. His authorized and deeply
researched biography is both intimate and objective, a rich and
unsparing portrait of a complicated, charismatic, and haunted man and a
sympathetic reading of his work that will help to secure Stone's place
in the pantheon of major American writers.
