The first and definitive biography of one of the great American novelists of the postwar era, 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...