August 21, 1937

Robert Stone (August 21, 1937 to January 10, 2015) was a novelist who fell right into the 1960s, hanging out with Kesey and visiting the moral dilemmas he would visualize in his fiction. Dog Soldiers (1975) was an early awarding winning novel.

Let's glance at his New York Times obituary:

Robert Stone was one of the few writers to capture the apocalyptic madness of America in the 1960s and ’70s, as the country lurched deeper into the jungles of Vietnam and the counterculture party at home turned increasingly nihilistic, as Woodstock gave way to Altamont and as violence — propagated by the likes of both Charles Manson and the Weather Underground — rocked the home front....

.....[T]he people in his books tend to be outsiders in love with danger or the edge, or some idea of themselves as seekers trying to follow their dreams. They are drawn to dangerous places (Vietnam, Central America, the Middle East) and dangerous activities (deep-sea diving, solo sea voyages). They take too many drugs and drink too much alcohol, and the men are given to macho “antler rattling” and poor impulse control.....

He wrote that being the right age in the ’60s provided the sense that one was witnessing a hinge moment in history, and it fueled a self-importance. “In our time,” he wrote, “we were clamorous and vain. I speak not only for myself here, but for all those with whom I shared the era and what I think of as its attitudes. We wanted it all; sometimes we confused self-destructiveness with virtue and talent, obliteration with ecstasy, heedlessness with courage.” He added: “We wanted to die well every single day, to be a cool guy and good-looking corpse. How absurd, because nothing is free, and we had to learn that at last.”.....

Mr. Stone’s books have a high population of pilgrims, agitators, crackpots and extremists of all sorts. Some are in search of something particular — true love, big-time money, a major score. All crave salvation — a sighting of God, or what Mr. Stone has called “the numinous.”....

More often than not, however, their searches for existential wisdom are likely to end in a glimpse of the abyss or their own mortality. In “A Flag for Sunrise,” the hero goes diving off a coral reef and feels a “shudder pass over all the living things around him” — a shark, perhaps, or something more metaphysical, “an invisible shadow, a silence within a silence.”

...... [Death of the Black-Haired Girl, 2013, is] a fast-paced psychological thriller that underscored his characters’ spiritual yearnings and their creator’s conviction...[;] as he once put it, that “it’s very difficult to be even basically decent; it is much easier for people to betray themselves than we think it is.”

How we think it is is that this writer can't tell the difference between a drug trip and a mystical experience. On a different topic we conclude that cats are not the stars in his stories:

Fun with Problems (2010) features one short story with a "[p]art Persian, with a fluffy neck and huge stupid eyes,....a survivor of milder, homelier days at the jail..."

In A Flag for Sunrise (2012) a scene is set with "dark children, scroungy with gutter dirt, ....stalking a cat among the crates and bottles under the tree."

His memoir Prime Green, published in 2007 does not mention cats.