Novelist Robert Stone dies at age 77

Robert Stone at the Saint-Malo Book Fair in Saint-Malo, France, in 2004. Robert Stone at the Saint-Malo Book Fair in Saint-Malo, France, in 2004. Photo: ANDERSEN ULF / Getty Images Photo: ANDERSEN ULF / Getty Images Image 1 of / 5 Caption Close Novelist Robert Stone dies at age 77 1 / 5 Back to Gallery

Robert Stone, the National Book Award-winning author whose globe-spanning, often socially charged novels delved into his characters’ despair with bleak humor, has died at age 77.

The cause of death was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, said his literary agent, Neil Olson.

Mr. Stone, who had suffered from severe emphysema in recent years, died Saturday afternoon at his home in Key West, Fla., where the New Yorker spent winters with Janice Stone, his wife of 55 years.

Mr. Stone is perhaps best known for his second novel, “Dog Soldiers” (1974), centered on an undistinguished Vietnam War correspondent whose life is upended after he smuggles a few kilos of heroin to Berkeley. The book won the National Book Award for Fiction (sharing it with “The Hair of Harold Roux,” by Thomas Williams) and was adapted into the 1978 film “Who’ll Stop the Rain,” starring Nick Nolte.

Mr. Stone’s other novels include “A Flag for Sunrise” (1981), “Outerbridge Reach” (1992) and “Damascus Gate” (1998). He also wrote a memoir, “Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties” (2007), which chronicled his heady days as a Stegner Fellow at Stanford, hanging out with Ken Kesey’s LSD-fueled Merry Pranksters, as they came to be known.

'Like a Garden of Eden’

“It was just incredible to come here from New York to the Peninsula, the Stanford area, the way it was in 1962,” Mr. Stone said in a 2010 interview with The Chronicle. “It was like a Garden of Eden with no snakes. It was the most beautiful, most mellow — all those kind of dopey California words come true. You could get some little bungalow up a canyon for 60 bucks a month next to a creek and live oaks. It was easy living. Getting the fellowship, meeting the people I met, it was just such an extremely lucky thing for me.”

Mr. Stone’s last work was a campus novel, “Death of the Black-Haired Girl,” published in 2013. In his review of the book for The Chronicle, Alan Cheuse wrote that Mr. Stone, “who has survived relatively brief teaching stints at Yale and Johns Hopkins, takes up the usually enervating and dull material endemic to universities ... and bestows on it a laser eye and gift of soul and language he has heretofore reserved for more immediately arresting material.”

Mr. Stone’s short-story collections included “Fun With Problems” (2010), whose title neatly encapsulates the author’s darkly humorous take on his ill-fated characters.

In his interview with The Chronicle, Mr. Stone said, “There’s always been, in my stories, something more abrasive and just harder on the characters, holding them at a distance and making fun of them, making their mistakes and their obsessions comical in one aspect. But I think the joke that I’m after when I do that is really on me.”

Olson, Mr. Stone’s agent, said, “People would see his photograph and would expect to meet Ernest Hemingway. But what you found instead was the sweetest, kindest fellow in the world. He was that man of adventure, but I don’t think there was any swagger to him at all.”

Peripatetic nature

Mr. Stone was born in New York City in 1937, raised until age 6 by his mother, who had schizophrenia and was institutionalized. His father had abandoned the family, so young Robert was sent to an orphanage.

Mr. Stone told The Chronicle that his peripatetic nature — he had also lived in New Orleans and London and set his stories around the world, from Central America to the Middle East — had to do with his hardscrabble upbringing.

“I grew up in this kind of declasse transient Manhattan,” he said. “My mother was a schoolteacher who got fired. I was really a very difficult, obnoxious teenager. I went to a Marist Brothers school and I got kicked out when I was a senior, and I joined the Navy. And when I got out I started NYU. I ended up living in the same kind of crummy hotels my mother had lived in. So I never reflected a milieu because I never exactly had a definable milieu. I was always using somebody else’s scene.”

Mr. Stone also told The Chronicle that his emphysema was “my punishment for chain-smoking.” However, he laughingly recalled his reaction to a doctor telling him that smoking would harm him in his old age. “I’m not going to know I’m alive!” Mr. Stone said.

Mr. Stone’s survivors include his widow, Janice, and their two children, Deirdre and Ian.

The Dean-Lopez Funeral Home in Key West said no funeral arrangements have yet been made.

John McMurtrie is The San Francisco Chronicle’s book editor. E-mail: jmcmurtrie@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @McMurtrieSF