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Robert Stone (novelist)
Robert Anthony Stone (August 21, 1937 – January 10, 2015) was an American novelist, journalist, and college professor.
He was five times a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, which he did receive in 1975 for his novel Dog Soldiers. Time magazine included this novel in its list 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. Stone was also twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and once for the PEN/Faulkner Award.
During his lifetime Stone received material support and recognition including Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, the five-year Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award, the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, and the American 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 the PEN/Faulkner Foundation Board of Directors for over thirty years.
Stone's best-known work is characterized by action-tinged adventures, political concerns and dark humor. Many of his novels are set in unusual, exotic landscapes of raging social turbulence, such as the Vietnam War; a post-coup violent banana republic in Central America; Jim Crow-era New Orleans, and Jerusalem on the verge of the millennium.
Stone was born in Brooklyn, New York on August 21, 1937 to Homer Stone, who worked for the New Haven Railroad, and Gladys Grant, a teacher. 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". Until the age of six he was raised primarily by his mother, who suffered from schizophrenia; after she was institutionalized, he spent several years in a Catholic orphanage. 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".
Stone was expelled from a Marist high school during his senior year for "drinking too much beer and being 'militantly atheistic'". Soon afterwards, Stone joined the Navy for four years. At sea he traveled to many locales, including Antarctica and Egypt. But according to Stone, it was his first shore leave in a pre-Fidel Castro era Havana, 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 with Creole 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."
In the early 1960s, he briefly attended New York University; worked as a copy boy at the New York Daily News; married and moved to New Orleans; and held the Stegner Fellowship (1962-1963) at the Stanford University Creative Writing Center, where he began writing a novel. Although he associated with the influential post-Beat Generation writer Ken Kesey and other Merry Pranksters, he was not a passenger on the famous 1964 bus trip to New York, contrary to some media reports. 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 dyspeptic Jack Kerouac.
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Robert Stone (novelist)
Robert Anthony Stone (August 21, 1937 – January 10, 2015) was an American novelist, journalist, and college professor.
He was five times a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, which he did receive in 1975 for his novel Dog Soldiers. Time magazine included this novel in its list 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. Stone was also twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and once for the PEN/Faulkner Award.
During his lifetime Stone received material support and recognition including Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, the five-year Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award, the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, and the American 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 the PEN/Faulkner Foundation Board of Directors for over thirty years.
Stone's best-known work is characterized by action-tinged adventures, political concerns and dark humor. Many of his novels are set in unusual, exotic landscapes of raging social turbulence, such as the Vietnam War; a post-coup violent banana republic in Central America; Jim Crow-era New Orleans, and Jerusalem on the verge of the millennium.
Stone was born in Brooklyn, New York on August 21, 1937 to Homer Stone, who worked for the New Haven Railroad, and Gladys Grant, a teacher. 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". Until the age of six he was raised primarily by his mother, who suffered from schizophrenia; after she was institutionalized, he spent several years in a Catholic orphanage. 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".
Stone was expelled from a Marist high school during his senior year for "drinking too much beer and being 'militantly atheistic'". Soon afterwards, Stone joined the Navy for four years. At sea he traveled to many locales, including Antarctica and Egypt. But according to Stone, it was his first shore leave in a pre-Fidel Castro era Havana, 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 with Creole 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."
In the early 1960s, he briefly attended New York University; worked as a copy boy at the New York Daily News; married and moved to New Orleans; and held the Stegner Fellowship (1962-1963) at the Stanford University Creative Writing Center, where he began writing a novel. Although he associated with the influential post-Beat Generation writer Ken Kesey and other Merry Pranksters, he was not a passenger on the famous 1964 bus trip to New York, contrary to some media reports. 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 dyspeptic Jack Kerouac.