A Prankster Looks Back on His Career

Stone wrote eight novels, including Dog Soldiers, and a memoir. He died Saturday at the age of 77. In 1986 and 2007, Stone talked with Terry Gross about, among other things, writing and his childhood.

Novelist Robert Stone has written a new memoir that begins with a stint in the Navy in the late 1950s, continues through his work as a journalist in Vietnam and then includes his counterculture years in the 1970s, taking hallucinogenic drugs, cross-country road trips, and hanging out with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. His memoir is, Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties. Stone's novels include Dog Soldiers (which was adapted into the film Who'll Stop the Rain), and Outerbridge Reach.

Novelist Robert Stone. His new novel "Damascus Gate" is about the Middle East. Unlike most writers who write about the region, Stone is not Jewish; he's a lapsed Catholic. One reviewer writes of the book that it is "so comprehending of Israel's convoluted workings and its bifurcated culture--where the Biblical fervor of Jerusalem coexists with the disco fever of Tel Aviv--that he makes other writers on the subject seem like the breeziness of literary tourists." Stone is also the author of "Outerbridge Reach" and "Dog Soldiers."