Synopses & Reviews
Prime Green opens during Robert Stone's last year in the Navy, when he took part in operation Deep Freeze 3, an Anarctic trip that involved circumnavigating the globe. Once out of the Navy, Stone worked for the old
New York Daily News and started school at NYU. He started hanging out at the Cedar Tavern just to be in the same room as Kline and DeKooning.
From there they drifted to the French Quarter of New Orleans, where they tried to make a living reading poetry to jazz and working for the Census Bureau. Eventually, in 1962, they went to California, where Ken Kesey had just finished participating in the LSD experiments that were to contribute to the age of psychedelia. Stone experienced the mid-60s of The Merry Pranksters and The Grateful Dead first-hand, accompanied by heavy doses of psychedelics. He travelled for a time on Kesey's celebrated Furthur bus tour, and experienced his 'Acid Test' parties that were later detailed in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The book closes in Vietnam, where Stone witnessed the invasion of Laos as a correspondent for a counter cultural publication.
A powerful memoir, Prime Green, provides an insiders look at a time many knew about only distantly. Stone's expertise as a novelist has helped him here, in his first book-length work of nonfiction, to forge a moving and adventurous portrait of a unique moment in American history.
Review
"Opening the trunk on the American Sixties might seem at first to be a fearsome, even a rueful undertaking. However, the incomparable novelist Robert Stone is obviously destinys choice for the role of narrator-guide. Stone has all the writerly refinements. He writes with great clarity, felicity and with perfect pitch. But more significantly he writes with unnostalgic compassion and intelligence for that tumultuous time, now surprisingly low on our horizon, but that by some necromancy of history has presented us with all we see around us today." Richard Ford
Review
"Stone's descriptive and rhetorical intensity and versatility are strongly imprinted on every page...An excellent piece of work, and an invaluable gloss on a body of fiction that looks more prescient, and important, as the decades pass." Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Review
"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." Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
Review
"Stone is adept at scenes and situations, and what could otherwise have been a somewhat banal listing of itinerant jobs that waft through his narrative...is instead enlivened with his irreverence in detail." Chicago Tribune
Review
"Perpetual witness to outrage and sorrow, he maintains a stance about the war and the US orchestration that is wonderfully even handed." Boston Globe
Synopsis
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.
About the Author
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.