Robert Stone (novelist) - Fiction

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.