In the twenty-five years between the publication of Robert Stone's first novel, A Hall of Mirrors (1967) and the critical response to his fifth, Outerbridge Reach (1992), he has incised a striking imprint on the terrain of contemporary American fiction. One of our best contemporary critics, William Pritchard, has written that Stone's novels are literally impossible to put down.

Here, perhaps, are several of the causes of Stone's hold on the attentive reader: the precision and variety of his narrative voices as they range from the genuinely lyrical to accents that perfectly capture the inner life of his more desperate, violent characters; his uncanny ear for the spoken idioms of all sorts of people; the scope and trenchancy of his critique of the contemporary American experience, particularly experience pushed to its extremities.

But if Stone believes that life is at bottom war, his aesthetic control of his conflicts lifts the agonies he describes into something transfigured by the imagination that gave birth to them.

Robert Solotaroff's study begins with a remarkable first chapter in which he follows Stone from birth to the publication of his first novel. Solotaroff's insight - as he recounts Stone's evolution from an abused child raised by a schizophrenic mother, to a West Side gang member who was thrown out of high school, through a hitch in the Navy that included combat, and finally into a respected author - allows more than a mere glimpse into the worlds of Robert Stone's novels.

In the subsequent chapters, Solotaroff examines each of the novels, his research informed not only by exhaustive readings but also by interviews with the author. Having carefully spanned the events that fire and support Stone's fiction, Solotaroff attends to the style and content with equal conviction and vigilance. Finally, he devotes an entire chapter to Stone's stories and nonfiction, substantial and penetrating bodies of work in their own right