Robert Stone was born in August 1937, nine months after Don DeLillo and three - we're told - after Thomas Pynchon. Dog Soldiers, his second novel, made his name in the mid-1970s, and since then he has stubbornly held his ground on the upper slopes of American literary life. Fellowships, prizes, grants and commissions have rarely been in short supply, and his later books - from A Flag for Sunrise to Damascus Gate - have been much admired. Unlike his more famous contemporaries, however, Stone has never achieved the high renown conferred by the combination of academic enshrinement and great visibility (or, in Pynchon's case, invisibility). Nor is his work so well known outside the US. Despite some tremendous blurb-work from his reviewers ('Mr Stone kicks the brain around; we live in heresy; Satan prevails' - New York Times), he has remained a cultish figure: a bearded professor trailed by whispers of drugs, booze, Vietnam.

LRB 18 March 2004 | PDF Download