United States Studies, United States History - 20th Century - 1945 to 2000, United States History - General & Miscellaneous, US & Canadian Literary Biography, Civilization - History, Literary Biography

Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties

Name: Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties
Author: Robert Stone
ISBN: 9780060957773

by Robert Stone

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Overview

From the New York City of Kline and De Kooning to the jazz era of New Orleans's French Quarter, to Ken Kesey's psychedelic California, Prime Green explores the 1960s in all its weird, innocent, turbulent, and fascinating glory. Building on personal vignettes from Robert Stone's travels across America, the legendary novelist offers not only a riveting and powerful memoir but also an unforgettable inside perspective on a unique moment in American history.

Synopsis

A memoir of America's most turbulent, whimsical decade, in the words of the man who experienced it all...

From the New York City of Kline and De Kooning to the jazz era of New Orleans's French Quarter to Ken Kesey's psychedelic California, Prime Green explores the 1960s in all its weird, innocent, fascinating glory. An account framed by two wars, it begins with Robert Stone's last year in the Navy, when he took part in an Antarctic expedition navigating the globe, and ends in Vietnam, where he was a correspondent in the days following the invasion of Laos. Told in scintillating detail, Prime Green zips from coast to coast, from days spent in the raucous offices of Manhattan tabloids to the breathtaking beaches of Mexico, and merry times aboard the bus with Kesey and the Pranksters.

Building on personal vignettes from Stone's travels across America, this powerful memoir offers the legendary novelist's inside perspective on a time many understand only peripherally. These accounts of the 1960s are riveting not only because Stone is a master storyteller but because he was there, in the thick of it, through all the wild times. From these incredible experiences, Prime Green forges a moving and adventurous portrait of a unique moment in American history.

The Washington Post - Wendy Smith

There aren't many authors who write about metaphysical matters with such passionate unpretentiousness. So it's no surprise to find that Stone's memoir of the 1960s views with unsentimental clarity a decade that has been the subject of more overheated rhetoric than any other in U.S. history.

About the Author, Robert Stone

Robert Stone is the acclaimed author of seven novels, including A Hall of Mirrors (winner of the National Book Award), A Flag for Sunrise, Children of Light, Outerbridge Reach, Damascus Gate, and Bay of Souls. His short-story collection, Bear and His Daughter, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Stone lives with his wife in New York City.

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Editorials

From Barnes & Noble

At times, novelist Robert Stone's trek through the '60s was literally a joy ride: He traveled cross-country with Ken Kesey's acid-fueled Merry Pranksters, imbibing psychedelics and the master's wisdom. Sometimes though, this Brooklyn-born Navy veteran was caught up in a different kind of history: He served as a correspondent in Vietnam and witnessed the Cold War invasion of Laos. Along the way, he metamorphosed into a major American writer: His 1967 novel, A Hall of Mirrors, won a William Faulkner Foundation prize, and his 1974 novel, Dog Soldiers, based partially on his Asian experiences, won a National Book Award. Prime Green recounts Stone's long, strange trip to greatness.

Men’s Vogue

“Think A Moveable Feast on acid.”

Men's Vogue

"Think A Moveable Feast on acid."

Louisville Courier Journal

"…[the] memories are as entertaining as they come."

Louisville Courier Journal

“…[the] memories are as entertaining as they come.”

Men's Vogue

“Think A Moveable Feast on acid.”

Michiko Kakutani

What Mr. Stone excels at is conjuring the mood of specific times and places, capturing the attitude he and his friends shared as well as the larger zeitgeist. He gives us the Lower East Side and Greenwich Village in the early ’60s, when the Bowery was still lined with flophouses and “roach-challenged bars,” and when going to an artist’s loft party was “like going to a party in the subway.”
— The New York Times

Wendy Smith

Publishers Weekly

It's a long, strange trip that's navigated in this engaging memoir. Novelist Stone (A Hall of Mirrors) recounts his salad days from a stint in the navy in the late 1950s to a desultory trip to Vietnam as a correspondent during the disastrous 1971 invasion of Laos. Stone largely sat out the civil rights and antiwar movements and cops to no ideology beyond "ordinary decency." His bailiwick was the relatively apolitical counterculture, which dawned for him when he took in Coltrane, Lenny Bruce and peyote in San Francisco in the early '60s and really kicked in when he entered the circle of literary provocateur and psychedelic guru Ken Kesey, the book's presiding genius. Memorable encounters with hallucinogens, and the resulting states of heightened awareness and stoned reflection, therefore loom large. But Stone's story, from a cross-country bus trip in which he ran a gauntlet of antihippie persecution to a stint crafting lurid headlines and freakish fables for sleazy supermarket tabloids, is also a funny, entertaining picaresque. (His big-picture ruminations say, on the links between the CIA, the drug culture and Silicon Valley sometimes have a period-authentic muzziness.) But Stone is a born storyteller, with a wonderful feel for place and character that vividly evokes the cultural gulf America crossed in that decade. Photos. (Jan.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Kirkus Reviews

Stone's first nonfiction book is a memoir of the decade when he came of age and absorbed experiences transformed into such memorable novels as Dog Soldiers (1974), Outerbridge Reach (1992) and Bay of Souls (2003). It's primarily a tale of people encountered and places seen, beginning in 1958 when Stone was a naval officer aboard a cargo ship performing geophysical research in latitudes approaching Antarctica. Despite side trips to Australia and South Africa, he ruefully concedes, "I felt very worldly, but in fact my international sophistication was severely limited." The persona thus established became a paradoxical survival skill, as Stone moved on to the first of two tours in New York City's journalistic world, marriage and fatherhood during lean years spent in New Orleans, back to New York, then to California (on a Stegner Writing Fellowship)-and into several drug-fueled years lived under the inspiration of Kerouac and the Beats and the saturnine tutelage of novelist-"prankster" Ken Kesey. Stone was in fact a passenger on the bus "Further" during its infamous 1964 cross-country joyride. Later, there were voyages to Paris and London, gigs with popular magazines (notably Esquire), the successful publication of his first novel, A Hall of Mirrors, and its unsuccessful filming spearheaded by Paul Newman, and a 1968 trip to Vietnam as a correspondent for the short-lived British publication INK. The author relates several interesting stories, including one about the Mexican misadventure that gives this book its arresting title. Stone's descriptive and rhetorical intensity and versatility are strongly imprinted on every page, but the book is not self-serving: As hard as he is on America'spuritanical legalism and reckless international adventuring, Stone is even more bluntly candid about the residue of his own ingenuous friendships and wasted youth (". . . in the end we allowed drugs to be turned into a weapon against everything we believed in"). An excellent piece of work, and an invaluable gloss on a body of fiction that looks more prescient, and important, as the decades pass.