Robert Stone

Stone grew up in New York with a schizophrenic mother, spent time in an orphanage, and joined the Navy at seventeen before drifting through journalism and Ken Kesey's Merry Prankster circle in 1960s California, an experience that fed his fiction's disillusioned countercultural edge.

A 1971 reporting trip to Saigon during the Vietnam War's final years supplied Dog Soldiers, which won the National Book Award and read the war's moral rot as something that had already infected America itself. He taught creative writing for decades at universities including Yale and Princeton.

His fiction returned repeatedly to journalists, addicts, and revolutionaries adrift in collapsing systems, from Central America to Jerusalem. He died in Key West, Florida, in 2015.