Robert Stone (1937 – )

Stone was born in Brooklyn, New York. Until the age of six he was raised by his mother, who suffered from schizophrenia; after she was institutionalized, he spent several years in a Catholic orphanage.

He dropped out of high school in 1954 and joined the Navy for four years, where he worked as a journalist. In the early 1960s, he briefly attended New York University; worked as a copyboy at the New York Daily News; married and moved to New Orleans; attended a workshop with Wallace Stegner in San Francisco, where he began writing a novel; met the influential Beat Generation writer Ken Kesey and travelled with the Merry Pranksters, before returning to New York.

In 1967 Stone published his first novel, A Hall of Mirrors, which won 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 into the 1970 film WUSA. The novel's success led to a Guggenheim Fellowship and began Stone's career as a professional writer and teacher.

His second novel, Dog Soldiers (1974), was a thriller of sorts about a journalist smuggling heroin from Vietnam (where Stone had briefly travelled as a war correspondent in 1971). It won the 1975 National Book Award, and was also adapted into a film, Who'll Stop the Rain.

Damascus Gate (1998), about a man with messianic delusions caught up in a terrorist plot in Jerusalem.

Stone currently lives in New York with his wife. He has two children.