His outlook on life had its genesis in an unorthodox childhood.

Robert Anthony Stone was born in Brooklyn on Aug. 21, 1937. His parents never married, Janice Stone said, and they separated when Robert was an infant. His father, Homer Stone, who worked for the New Haven Railroad, , was never in the picture after that. He was reared mostly by his mother, Gladys Grant, a teacher whose father was a tugboat captain, a fact that Mr. Stone said was an early seed of his fascination with the sea. She had schizophrenia, however, and was frequently hospitalized. From the ages of 6 to 10, Robert lived in an orphanage run by the Marist brothers.

“My early life was very strange,” Mr. Stone said in a 1985 Paris Review interview. “I was a solitary; radio fashioned my imagination. Radio narrative always has to embody a full account of both action and scene. I began to do that myself. When I was 7 or 8, I’d walk through Central Park like Sam Spade, describing aloud what I was doing, becoming both the actor and the writer setting him into the scene. That was where I developed an inner ear.”

Mother and son did travel together, making intermittent trips west, as far as New Mexico, on insubstantial errands that lasted until whatever money was available ran out.

“We usually ended up on welfare, then trying to get out of wherever we were,” he said. “It was wild, you know. It was useful. On the one hand, it gave me a fear of chaos, and on the other hand, it was a romance with the world and bus stations and things like that.”

Mr. Stone studied Latin in a Marist brothers high school, but he never finished; instead he joined the Navy, traveling to, among other places, Antarctica, an experience that informed the writing of “Outerbridge Reach.” He read voluminously — “Moby-Dick,” “Ulysses,” “On the Road” — wrote his first stories and got his first rejection slips. (Reading “The Great Gatsby” in his 20s, he said, was the spur for his first attempts at novel-writing.)

He also earned his high school equivalency diploma. When his tour was over he worked as a copy boy for The Daily News in New York and attended New York University. He never graduated, but he met a fellow writing student, Janice Burr, whom he married in 1959.

“She was a guidette at the RCA building,” Mr. Stone said about his wife. “She’d take off her uniform and go to this espresso bar where she waited tables. So she’d get out of her straight job, and I’d get out of my straight job at The News, and we’d go be beatniks together.”