Back Robert Stone

Robert Stone

1937–2015
Robert Stone in 1981. (Susan Aimee Weinik/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images)

Major works:
Dog Soldiers • A Flag for Sunrise • Outerbridge Reach • Damascus Gate

“Robert Stone is a great American writer in the tradition of Melville, Hawthorne, Dreiser, Dos Passos, Hemingway; his fiction suggests, in its dramatic ambiguities, the moral concerns of Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene. . . . For all the gravity of his subjects, Bob Stone was a truly funny person, a born storyteller, sometimes of riotous tall tales. He was a beacon of clarity who took us to dark places but did not abandon us there.”—Joyce Carol Oates

“All of Stone’s work is about the confusing fate that lies in wait behind the world of likely events. The startling break. The upsetting loss, when all the odds were in your favor. Being confused, overwrought, out of luck, or nearly so—all of Stone’s characters arrive at this moment. And then they get up and push onward. You may or may not like his heroes. But you have to admire their will to live.”—Bryan VanDyke, The Millions

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