num_pages: 608
description: The first and definitive biography of one of the great American novelists of the postwar era the author of Dog Soldiers and A Flag for Sunrise and a penetrating critic of American power innocence and corruptionRobert 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 won the National Book Award) Central America (A Flag for Sunrise 1981) and Jerusalem on the eve of the millennium (Damascus Gate 1998).An acclaimed novelist himself Madison Smartt Bell was a close friend and longtime admirer of Robert Stone. His authorized and deeply researched biography is both intimate and objective a rich and unsparing portrait of a complicated charismatic and haunted man and a sympathetic reading of his work that will help to secure Stone's place in the pantheon of major American writers.
language: English
title: Child of Light: A Biography of Robert Stone
publisher: Doubleday Books