SOURCE: Edwards, Thomas R. “Desperate Characters.” New York Review of Books 44, no. 15 (9 October 1997): 36-8.

In the following review, Edwards provides an overview of Stone's fiction and offers a positive assessment of Bear and His Daughter.

Of the novelists who came into their own in the eventful, scary Sixties. Robert Stone remains one of the most serious and truthful. At first the violent worlds he described may have seemed marginal and extreme, but time would show how close they were to the American grain. Bear and His Daughter is his first collection of stories, and their dates are not given. The dust jacket says they were written “between 1969 and the present,” and they help us understand better a powerful writer whose career deserves more attention than it has got.

Stone's novels are much more than close hand, tough social reportage. He seems from the start to have been devising...