Discussed in this essay:

Child of Light, by Madison Smartt Bell. Doubleday. 608 pages. $35.
Robert Stone: Dog Soldiers, A Flag for Sunrise, Outerbridge Reach, by Robert Stone, edited by Madison Smartt Bell. Library of America. 1,216 pages. $45.

The novelist Robert Stone once said that his subject was “America and Americans.” Indeed, as Madison Smartt Bell writes in his new biography of Stone, Child of Light, Stone’s fiction depicts “the evolution of America’s sense of itself—from the naïve ebullience of the 1950s to the tenebrous uncertainties of the post-9/11 twenty-first century,” and it did so in a…