American writer known as one of the most important American novelists by 1974 with the publication of “Dog Soldiers.” Stone served in the U.S. Navy 1955-1958 and also went through a period in the drug culture. He taught in seven major universities 1972-1985.
Robert Anthony Stone was born in south Brooklyn, New York City to C. Homer and Gladys Catherine (Grant) Stone. His father left the family during Robert’s infancy. Robert’s mother was an elementary school teacher, but she lost her job due to schizophrenia. When she was able, she worked as a hotel maid and managed to provide a home for the two of them in cheap rooming houses and welfare hotels. For a few years, beginning at age five or six, Robert lived in an orphanage. In spite of this challenging upbringing, he has said his childhood was not unhappy.
Robert always had a love of language and writing, and his skills were honed at the Catholic schools he attended. He had to quit school before graduation because of “militantly atheistic” behavior.
In 1955 he enlisted in the U.S. Navy and served as a radioman and then as a journalist. When he left the Navy in 1958, he enrolled in New York University, but gave that up as soon as he was offered a job as an editorial assistant for the New York Daily News. After a couple of years there, he moved on to seek his fulfillment in the “romantic” city of New Orleans. He became involved in the beatnik subculture, wrote poetry, and worked at various jobs.
In 1962, he returned to New York and began to write a novel that earned him a Stegner fellowship in the creative writing program at Stanford, requiring a move to California. In Menlo Park, he became involved with the Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters “acid-dropping” counterculture as easily as he had with the beatniks in New Orleans. Through his experimentation with drugs he came to confront his deeply religious world-view. He discovered that he would always view everything as a mystic process. During this period he also clarified his metaphor of America as New Orleans because it seemed to exemplify conditions throughout the country in the extreme. He wrote “A Hall of Mirrors” in 1967 with this theme. The novel was selected as winner of the 1968 William Faulkner Foundation Award for a “notable first novel.” Paramount Pictures released a film adaptation of the novel in 1970 with the title “WUSA.”
In 1971 he went to London with the help of a Guggenheim fellowship, resolving to write his second novel about America. Deciding he needed to see for himself what was going on in Vietnam, he obtained credentials from a London paper and spent two months there. What he learned about the drug trade in Saigon was as disturbing to him as anything on the firing line. Later that year he returned to the U.S. and incorporated his heightened awareness into “Dog Soldiers,” published in 1974. “Dog Soldiers” won the National Book Award for 1974 and earned him a place as one of the most important novelists of the decade. United Artists released the film based on his novel in 1978 as “Who’ll Stop the Rain?”
Stone’s honors include the John Dos Passos prize for literature and an award in literature from the American Academy and Institute, both in 1982. Since 1971 when he was appointed writer-in-residence at Princeton, he has moved around the academic community. He was on the faculty of Amherst College from 1972 to 1975 and from 1977 to 1978; Stanford University in 1979; University of Hawaii from 1979 to 1980; Harvard University in 1981; University of California at Irvine in 1982; New York University in 1983 and Princeton University in 1985. Teaching is a part of what Stone calls his “embourgeoisement.”
He keeps in touch with his friend from his Merry Prankster days, Ken Kesey, but refrains from the use of drugs and alcohol, except vicariously through his novels’ characters. He maintains a stable home in a small New England town with his wife Janice (Burr), whom he married on 12/11/1959. They have a daughter, Deirdre and a son, Ian. Mrs. Stone is a social worker.
Stone is of medium height and build with the ruddy complexion of the outdoor life. He has thinning red-brown hair and free-growing beard. He is reserved and shy, soft-spoken and precise in his word-choice. He enjoys snorkeling on his holidays.
Link to Wikipedia biography