Fiction
In 1967, Stone published his first novel, A Hall of Mirrors, which won both a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship, and a William Faulkner Foundation award for best first novel. Set in New Orleans in 1962 and based partly on actual events, the novel depicted a political scene dominated by right-wing racism, but its style was more reminiscent of Beat writers than of earlier social realists: alternating between naturalism and stream of consciousness, with a large cast of often psychologically unstable characters, it set the template for much of Stone's later writing. It was adapted as a film, WUSA (1970). The novel's success led to a Guggenheim Fellowship and began Stone's career as a professional writer and teacher.
In 1971 he traveled to Vietnam as a correspondent for a British journal. His time there served as the inspiration for his second novel, Dog Soldiers (1974), which features a journalist smuggling heroin from Vietnam in a doomed attempt to do something purposeful, -- an urge that drives many of Stone's characters. It shared the 1975 U.S. National Book Award with The Hair of Harold Roux by Thomas Williams. Dog Soldiers was also adapted as a film, Who'll Stop the Rain (1978).
A Flag for Sunrise (1981) further developed Stone's trademark brand of acid-tinged existential realism while continuing to explore broad political and social questions as in his first two novels. The story follows a wide cast of characters drawn from the social types that consistently interest him, as their paths intersect in a fictionalized Nicargaua. Catalyzing the crises of belief faced by each character is a backdrop of violent political struggle between a U.S.-backed dictator and almost equally corrupt Marxist revolutionaries planning to get arms from a group of louche and feckless upper-class gun-runners who have shipped a lower class sociopath with a fierce but skewed sense of honor. This great novel was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. These first three novels are 20th century masterworks.
Stone's next two novels focused on smaller-scale conflicts: the psychotic breakdown of a movie actress in Children of Light, and a circumnavigation race in Outerbridge Reach (based loosely on the story of Donald Crowhurst). He returned to current events with Damascus Gate (1998), about a man with messianic delusions caught up in a terrorist plot in Jerusalem.
Read more about this topic: Robert Stone (novelist)
Famous quotes containing the word fiction:
“We ignore thriller writers at our peril. Their genre is the political condition. They massage our dreams and magnify our nightmares. If it is true that we always need enemies, then we will always need writers of fiction to encode our fears and fantasies.”
—Daniel Easterman (b. 1949)
“... fiction never exceeds the reach of the writer’s courage.”
—Dorothy Allison (b. 1949)
“A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send cheques to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)