Robert Stone

He is a chain smoker and suffers from severe emphysema.

Robert Stone was born to C. Homer and Gladys Catherine Stone in New York City. His father abandoned the family soon after Robert was born. His mother, who once worked as an elementary school teacher, suffered from schizophrenia and was fired from her job. She raised her son by working as a hotel maid.

His mother was institutionalized when he was around five or six years old and the young boy was sent to live in a Catholic orphanage.

He attended Catholic schools where he developed a love for language and reading. He dropped out of high school in 1954.

He enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1955 where he first served as a radioman and then as a journalist. He was in the navy till 1958 and traveled to many remote places like Antarctica and Egypt during this period; he also witnessed the bombing of the Port Said by the French Army.

In 1958, he found employment as an editorial assistant for the ‘New York Daily News’. He worked there for a couple of years before shifting to New Orleans.

He returned to New York in 1962 and earned a Stegner fellowship in the creative writing program at Stanford.

During the early 1960s he became involved with the beatnik subculture and met the Beat Generation writer Ken Kesey. He began experimenting with drugs and started viewing everything as a mystical experience.

His first novel ‘A Hall of Mirrors’ was published in 1967. The story focused around a formerly brilliant musician who turns into an alcoholic and gets involved in political problems. His debut novel was critically acclaimed and he was motivated to write more.

His best known work is ‘Dog Soldiers’, a novel about a journalist and a Merchant Marine sailor who get involved in a heroin deal. The novel was later adapted into a film and named by ‘TIME’ magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels, 1923 to 2005.