Bear and His Daughter: Stories

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Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997 - Fiction - 222 pages
By both literary ambition and literary reputation, Robert Stone, with five novels to his credit, has already established himself as one of the strongest and most impressive novelists of our time. He has taken readers from the underbelly of New Orleans to the jungles of Vietnam, from the brutality of war-torn Central America to the sinister glamour of Hollywood. It has been nearly five years since the publication of his best-selling novel Outerbridge Reach, a work distinguished for its integrity and vision. The stories collected in Bear and His Daughter span nearly thirty years. Written between 1969 and the present, they explore, as powerfully and acutely as his novels, our common troubled condition and the humanity that unites us. In "Miserere," Mary Urquhart is a widowed librarian whose unspeakable secret concerning the death of her husband and children causes her to undertake a most unusual and grisly role in the antiabortion crusade. In his classic and widely anthologized story "Hel

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About the author (1997)

Robert Stone was born in Brooklyn, New York on August 21, 1937. His parents never married and his father was not part of his life. His mother had schizophrenia and was frequently hospitalized. From the ages of 6 to 10, he lived in an orphanage run by the Marist brothers. In 1954, he dropped out of high school and joined the Navy, where he earned his high school equivalency diploma. In the 1960's, he briefly attended New York University, worked as a copy boy for the New York Daily News, and attended the Wallace Stegner writing workshop at Standford University. His first novel, A Hall of Mirrors, won a William Faulkner Foundation award for best first novel of 1967 and was adapted into a movie entitled WUSA starring Paul Newman. His other books include Children of Light, Outerbridge Reach, Damascus Gate, Bear and His Daughter, Fun with Problems, Bay of Souls, and Death of the Black-Haired Girl. He also wrote a memoir entitled Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties. He won numerous awards including the National Book Award in 1975 for Dog Soldier, which was adapted into a movie entitled Who'll Stop the Rain starring Nick Nolte and Tuesday Weld, and a PEN/Faulkner Award for A Flag for Sunrise. He died of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease on January 10, 2015 at the age of 77.

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