Child of Light

A Biography of Robert Stone

By: Madison Smartt Bell

Narrated by: Mark Deakins

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 corruption

Robert 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 '50s, 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.

©2020 Madison Smartt Bell (P)2020 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"The late Robert Stone always signed his missives, ‘A blessing,’ and that is what this book by the great Madison Smartt Bell is - a much-needed and lovingly assembled account of the life of Robert Stone, who remains a gifted visionary and a hero to so many, myself included." (Rachel Kushner, author of The Mars Room)

"This searching, intimate, deeply fascinating biography of Robert Stone is a boon for Stone fans that will surely lure new readers to his work. Madison Smartt Bell brings his tremendous storytelling gifts to Stone’s wild, colorful life and work, and the result is irresistible." (Jennifer Egan, author of Manhattan Beach)

"Bell meticulously recounts the life of Robert Stone.... A solid biography of an important American novelist." (Publishers Weekly)

Not so much a bio as a picture of an era

a wonderful biography of a remarkable man. From the '50s to the present, Robert Stone was eminently present always

A splendid writer gets a splendid biography

Here's a stunningly adhesive match between biographer and subject. Novelist Madison Smartt Bell intuitively understands Robert Stone, both as a writer and an individual. With literary ease and unusual access to intimate family records, Bell has re-created a vulnerable, talented man and his art in CHILD OF LIGHT. Usually I am all about biographies of historical women with an emphasis on gardens and art-- the opposite direction from Stone's testosterone-charged, alcoholic's life. But Madison Smartt Bell, with his combination of descriptive powers, his special brand of sympathy-with-neutrality, and his detective's bent, has created both a biography and a sumptuous aesthetic assessment. What compelled me (and propelled me through the book) was the chapter on Stone's childhood. The only son of a single working Catholic mother with huge mental health issues, Stone grew up in profoundly strange, yet strangely supportive, circumstances, sometimes almost as an orphan. Bell infuses the early life with such vitality that it winds through all Stone's accomplishments (and regrets) with a vine's vigor. It's a marriage story, too. (Stone’s wife Janice swam on his choppy sea of drugs, literary highs and lows, and infidelities.) Narrator Mark Deakins has the perfect laconic tone to take us on the Bell/Stone tandem ride. Deakins (voice of the Robert Redford biography) channels Stone's spirit in a warm, laid-back baritone. It's a double triumph for CHILD OF LIGHT: Deakins’ voice plus Smartt Bell's lucid style embodies the force field that was Robert Stone.