<Archive Obituaries> Irving Stone (August 26th 1989)
Bill Schenley
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The New York Times (August 28th 1989) ~
By Albin Krebs
Irving Stone, a prolific author whose exhaustively researched and
often immense biographical novels included ''Lust for Life,'' based on
the story of van Gogh, died of heart failure on Saturday night at
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was 86 years old and
lived in Beverly Hills, Calif.
Mr. Stone also wrote ''The Agony and the Ecstasy,'' based on the life
of Michelangelo, and biographical novels centering on the lives of
Andrew and Rachel Jackson, Mary Todd Lincoln, Eugene V. Debs and the
Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro.
He was sometimes credited with inventing the biographical novel in its
contemporary form; he was indisputably the most successful master of
the genre.
''His books on historic figures,'' said the historian Allan Nevins,
''have given a lively impression of the past to hundreds of thousands
of readers who could have been reached by no method less vivid and
vigorous than his.''
More Than 2 Dozen Books
Although biographical novels were his specialty, Mr. Stone also
produced two biographies, ''Clarence Darrow for the Defense'' in 1941,
and ''Earl Warren'' in 1948. ''They Also Ran,'' a lively study of
unsuccessful Presidential candidates, was published in 1943. There
were more than two dozen Stone books, including two nonbiographical
novels, and he wrote a number of unsuccessful plays.
Born in San Francisco on July 14, 1903, Mr. Stone, whose name was
Irving Tennenbaum, was the son of Charles Tennenbaum and the former
Pauline Rosenberg. When he was 7 years old his parents were divorced
and his mother put the boy in the care of his grandmother so she could
work as a buyer for a department store. His mother later married a
fellow buyer, and after Irving joined them in their new home he took
his stepfather's name.
The young Irving Stone was bookish and often tried his hand at
short-story writing. He said many years later that he was deeply
influenced by Jack London, who eventually was the subject of Mr.
Stone's biographical novel ''Sailor on Horseback.''
Played Saxophone in College
In 1920 he entered the University of California at Berkeley in
accordance with the wishes of his mother, who wanted him to study
medicine, but he settled on political science as a major. While at
Berkeley he supported himself playing saxophone in a dance band.
After receiving his bachelor's degree in 1923, Mr. Stone accepted a
teaching fellowship at the University of Southern California, where he
took a master's degree in economics. On another teaching fellowship he
studied for a doctorate at Berkeley, but he left the university in May
1926 without writing his doctoral thesis. The following month Mr.
Stone left for France, intent on a writing career.
As a budding playwright, Mr. Stone was prolific but not successful. In
a single year he churned out 17 plays, none of which was sold. But it
was during this period that he discovered, by chance, an exhibition at
the Rosenberg Galleries in Paris of the blazing canvases of van Gogh.
Passion for One Artist's Work
''It was the single most compelling emotional experience of my life,''
he said. ''I knew that I had to find out more about van Gogh. Even
though I was far too young, and felt I did not have sufficient
technique to write a book about Vincent van Gogh, I knew I had to try.
If I didn't I would never write anything else.''
Back in New York, Mr. Stone wrote mysteries for pulp magazines and
saved enough money to return to Europe and begin his work on van Gogh.
He spent six months tracing the artist's progress and career in
England, the Netherlands, Belgium and France. In 1931 the unwieldy
manuscript was finished, but ''Lust for Life'' was rejected by 17
publishers over the next three years.
Meanwhile, in 1933, Mr. Stone succeeded in having published ''Pageant
of Youth,'' which he described as ''a very bad novel indeed'' about
life on a California campus. He also met and courted Jean Factor, a
young editor who studied ''Lust for Life'' and suggested how it might
be cut to readable size. When Longmans, Green & Company published the
book in 1934 it was hailed as a fine biographical novel and became an
immediate best seller.
Assistance of His Wife
Mr. Stone and Miss Factor were married and financed their honeymoon on
the $250 advance he had got on the book. She was to serve as
co-researcher and editor of all his books. They had two children,
Paula and Kenneth, and lived in Beverly Hills, except for frequent
long stays in places where the subjects of Mr. Stone's books had lived
and worked.
In choosing historical subjects to write about, what aroused Mr.
Stone's curiosity was the suspicion that a character had been
misunderstood or unfairly misrepresented by previous studies. He was
also intrigued by how the women in the lives of men in the public eye
influenced them.
For example, he became convinced that Jessie Benton Fremont was not
only exciting but also an intelligent woman living in a time of
extraordinary change. She had married a brilliant man, John C.
Fremont, a colorful 19th-century explorer, politician and soldier. Mr.
Stone chose to place the focus of his story on the woman in Fremont's
life, and ''The Immortal Wife'' (1944) became one of his most popular
books.
The Fabric of Relationships
Mr. Stone again examined the effect of marriage on an important
historical figure in ''Adversary in the House,'' a 1947 novel about
Eugene V. Debs, the American radical, and in ''The President's Lady''
(1951), a romantic account of Andrew and Rachel Jackson.
Mr. Stone also wrote a novel about the relationship of Abraham and
Mary Todd Lincoln, ''Love is Eternal,'' in 1954. He sought to dispel
the prevailing notion that Mary Todd Lincoln was a vile-tempered,
jealous harridan who made Lincoln's life miserable at a time when he
had the responsibilities of the Civil War on his shoulders.
For his study of Michelangelo, ''The Agony and the Ecstasy,''
published in 1961, the Stones spent more than two years in Italy doing
research. The total research and writing time was more than four
years.
Making the 'Intuitive Leap'
''My books are based 98 percent on documentary evidence,'' Mr. Stone
told an interviewer. ''I spend several years trying to get inside the
brain and heart of my subjects, listening to the interior monologues
in their letters, and when I have to bridge the chasms between the
factual evidence, I try to make an intuitive leap through the eyes and
motivation of the person I'm writing about.''
Mr. Stone's novels included ''The Passionate Journey,'' a life of the
American artist John Noble; ''The Origin,'' subtitled ''A Biographical
Novel of Charles Darwin''; ''Dear Theo,'' an ''autobiography'' of van
Gogh compiled from the artist's copious letters to his beloved
brother; ''Men to Match My Mountains,'' a panoramic view of the
opening of the Far West in the 19th century; ''Those Who Love,'' about
Abigail Adams; ''Depths of Glory,'' the novel on the painter Pissarro,
and ''The Passions of the Mind,'' based on the life of Sigmund Freud.
Surviving are his wife; his son, Kenneth, of Los Angeles; his
daughter, Paula, of Santa Cruz, Calif., and a grandson.
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Irving Stone Dies At Age 86; Best-Selling 'Bio-Historian'
FROM: The Los Angeles Times (August 28th 1989) ~
By Myrna Oliver, Staff Writer
Irving Stone, a master of the biographical novel who spun narratives
around the lives of such diverse historical figures as Mary Todd
Lincoln and Michelangelo, has died in Los Angeles at the age of 86.
The prolific author of more than 25 books, including "Lust for Life"
and "The Agony and the Ecstasy," died at 11:20 p.m. Saturday at
Cedars-Sinai Hospital, where his family said he had been receiving
treatment for cancer since July 24.
Paula Correia, a hospital official, said that death was attributed to
cardiopulmonary arrest.
Stone remained an active writer almost to the end. At the time of his
death he was close to finishing a new book, his wife, Jean, who worked
with him editing his books, said Sunday.
"He left enough material to be edited and to finish it," she said,
declining to specify the subject. "It's a biographical novel, and he
figured that it would be ready by the fall of next year."
With "Lust for Life," Stone's 1934 epic of artist Vincent van Gogh,
the graduate of Los Angeles' Manual Arts High School virtually created
a new art form, which he sometimes called "biohistory: the telling of
history in terms of the human beings who lived it."
Stone took on complex characters who intrigued him -- Mary Todd
Lincoln in "Love Is Eternal," published in 1954; Michelangelo in "The
Agony and the Ecstasy," 1961; Sigmund Freud in "The Passions of the
Mind," 1971, and Charles Darwin in "The Origin," 1980 -- and
approached his subjects as a detective, searching for facts that would
provide insight into their lives.
He identified with his characters so intensely that he seemed almost
to become the character. On the 40th anniversary of Van Gogh's death,
Stone lay on the bed in the room where the artist had died at 1:20
a.m. He related later that he became more and more faint "until
finally at 1:19 I threw off the covers, dashed to the back window,
stuck my head out and took in deep lungsful of the night air."
"His work was absolutely authentic," his wife said. "Nobody can touch
his research. He was willing to put two or three years into it. Most
authors don't want to put that much time into research. They want to
get on to the fun work of writing. But he loved the research."
She said her husband wanted to be remembered "as an author who brought
to enormous numbers of people an understanding of men or women whom
they would not ordinarily have understood. He would have wanted to
complete a tolerance for people who want to do things that are not
completely traditional."
Although some literary experts have belittled the biographical novel
as neither good biography nor good fiction, Stone saw nobility in the
genre, as he once explained in a UCLA lecture:
"The biographical novel is a true and documented story of one human
being's journey across the face of the years, transmuted from the raw
material of life into the delight and purity of an authentic art form.
"It is based on the conviction that the best of all plots lie in human
character and that human character is endlessly colorful and
revealing. The biographical novel sets out to document this truth, for
character is plot, character development is action, and character
fulfillment is resolution."
Pure Biographies
Stone also wrote pure biography, including "Sailor on Horseback; a
Biography of Jack London," about one of his early literary idols, in
1938, and "Clarence Darrow for the Defense," published in 1941. Those
stories, he once said in an interview, were "so unusual and dramatic"
that he feared that writing them in novel form would make readers
think they were fiction.
But the pragmatic Stone also wanted to write books that would sell.
"I know from experience that biographies have a limited audience," he
once told the New York Times. "We have thousands of readers who love
(the biographical novel) and are thrilled by it, who'd never get near
a conventional biography."
Even critics who scorned biographical novels agreed, like Alan R.
Shucard, who wrote for "Contemporary Novelists" in 1982: "The history
he spoon-feeds is far more palatable and interesting than popcorn, and
it is no wonder that an enormous public should devour it."
Later, Stone developed a talent for selling his stories to movie
producers as well.
Irving Stone was born in San Francisco on July 14, 1903, to Charles
Tennenbaum and Pauline Rosenberg Tennenbaum. His parents divorced when
he was 7, and when his mother remarried, he took his stepfather's
surname.
Stone began writing short stories at the age of 9 and at 10 discovered
the motivating work for his literary career: Jack London's largely
autobiographical novel about a self-made writer, "Martin Eden."
Impact of 'Martin Eden'
"What 'Martin Eden' convinced me of was not that I wanted to become a
book author, but that it was entirely possible," Stone told an
interviewer in 1980. "If Jack London could be a world-accepted author,
so could I. I started with considerably more advantages than Jack
did."
The Stones moved to Los Angeles during the budding writer's teens, and
he was graduated from Manual Arts High School in February, 1920. He
spent his first college semester at USC and then transferred to UC
Berkeley, paying his way through college by playing saxophone in a
dance band.
After graduation in 1923 with a political science degree, he earned
his master's degree at USC on an economics teaching fellowship. He
then returned to Berkeley on another teaching fellowship and studied
for two years toward a doctorate, but dropped out.
In 1926, Stone went to France to write plays, churning out 31 one-act
plays and 17 full-length ones in less than 15 months. As he recalled
in an article he wrote for the Los Angeles Times more than 30 years
later, a Sorbonne student who was teaching him French cajoled him into
viewing an exhibit of paintings by Vincent van Gogh, an artist he had
never heard of.
"If you are not happy with the exhibition," the French youth told him,
"I will buy you enough French wine to wipe out the boredom."
"It was," Stone said later of the encounter with Van Gogh's work, "the
single most compelling emotional experience of my life. . . .
"I had no idea of writing about Van Gogh, but when I returned to New
York and was still writing plays, which I took around to the producers
day after day and no one wanted, the story of Vincent van Gogh kept
crowding into my mind and pushing out all other thoughts and human
stories."
Sold Murder Mysteries
Stone financed his research trip to Europe by writing six 5,000- to
10,000-word murder mysteries in six days and selling five of them to
pulp magazines. He calculated that the earnings would permit him $2 a
day, including transportation, so he walked through Belgium, Holland
and France studying Van Gogh. With only $4.20 left, he worked his way
back to New York as a seaman on the S.S. President Wilson.
By writing and selling two 20,000-word murder mysteries for a penny a
word, he earned enough money to live on for six months and in that
time hammered out "Lust for Life" in four drafts.
Seventeen publishers turned down the manuscript, agreeing that they
could not sell a novel about "an unknown Dutch painter" to Americans
in the middle of the Depression.
The book was published Sept. 26, 1934, by the 18th publisher,
England-based Longmans Green, after Stone's fiancee, secretary Jean
Factor, cut the manuscript by about one-tenth. The publisher risked
printing 5,000 copies and gave Stone an advance of $250.
Within four days of publication, "Lust for Life" topped the New York
Sunday Mirror's best-seller list, and Irving Stone the playwright had
found a new focus for his career. The Van Gogh book has since sold
tens of millions of copies in more than 70 languages ranging from
Assamese to Urdu.
With the $250 advance, Stone married Factor, who became his
collaborating editor in a nearly 55-year partnership. Working in her
office at the opposite end of their Beverly Hills house from where he
wrote in longhand, she assisted with research and shortened and
cleaned up the manuscripts he sometimes described as "verbose."
Lecturing and teaching widely, Stone the perfectionist never left any
doubt that his novelized treatises required work. He devoted about
three years in the meticulous research and writing on a book, working
at least eight hours a day. His wife typically spent another year
editing and weaving scenes he sometimes wrote three or four different
ways.
'Don't Believe in Inspiration'
'There's nothing romantic about my work. . . . I don't believe in
inspiration," Stone said. "I believe that you get to your desk, you
stay there, you work, you think of nothing else. You write and you
write, and in the end you write something good."
Stone chose his characters according to three criteria -- whether they
had a great human story, could be loved by him and had improved the
lot of mankind.
"My goal always is to tell a universal story, meaning it's about a
person who has an idea, a vision, a dream, an ambition to make the
world somewhat less chaotic," he told the Los Angeles Times five years
ago.
"He or she suffers hardships, defeats, miseries, illnesses, poverty,
crushing blows. But ultimately that person accomplishes a big,
beautiful, gorgeous job of work, leaving behind a testimonial that the
human mind can grow and accomplish fantastic ends."
Those chronicled characters, however, did not work their way
automatically from best-sellers to the silver screen. Hollywood
producers initially ignored his books.
Then Stone started "talking" his stories to studio representatives
much as he introduced an idea for a new book to his editors at
Doubleday, which became his publisher in 1940. Pleased with the novel
salesmanship, Paramount snapped up "Immortal Wife," his tale of
soldier-explorer-politician Gen. John Fremont's wife, Jessie Benton
Fremont, for $125,000.
That broke the logjam, and Stone promptly used his one-hour monologue
pitches to sell others, including "Lust for Life," which starred Kirk
Douglas, and an original screenplay, "Magnificent Doll."
"Bigger audience," he replied, when asked by a Hollywood columnist in
1946 why movies were so important to a successful author. "Every
writer wants to reach the most people. And what are 5 million copies
to -- what is it -- 95 million moviegoers?"
Stone was frequently honored, but two of his favorite awards were
those given him by Italians for his 4 1/2-year labor of love, "The
Agony and the Ecstasy," about the Florence artist Michelangelo, which
was made into a movie in 1965 starring Charlton Heston. Those awards
were the Florentine Giglio d'Oro (Golden Lily) for "distinguished
service to our Renaissance city" in 1964 and the Republic of Italy's
Knight Commander award in 1965.
Honorary Doctorates
Stone garnered honorary doctorates from USC; Coe College in Cedar
Rapids, Iowa; California's state college system; UC Berkeley, and
Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati.
He and his wife initiated two annual $1,000 awards for the best
biographical and historical novels published and in 1985 created the
Jean and Irving Stone Honors Commons at UCLA.
Always civic-minded, Stone served on several groups, including the
California Citizens' Committee for Higher Education and the Eleanor
Roosevelt Memorial Foundation, and was once president of the Beverly
Hills Improvement Assn.
In addition to his wife, Stone is survived by his a son, Kenneth, a
photographer and lithographer; daughter, Paula Hubbell, a
criminologist, and her son, Vincent.
A memorial service will be held next week at the Leo Baeck Temple in
West Los Angeles, his wife said, adding: "A lot of his friends will
say some words about him and keep the feeling for him warm and alive."
No funeral will be held.
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FROM: The Independent (August 30th 1989) ~
By Rod MacLeish
Irving Tennenbaum (later Stone), novelist, born San Francisco 14 July
1903, married 1934 Jean Factor (one son, one daughter), died Los
Angeles 26 August 1989.
Irving Stone was the most successful biographical novelist in American
literary history. His books sold an estimated 30 million copies in 54
languages.
As Stone practised it, the biographical novel is based on exhaustive
research into the life and times of its subject. The life thus
revealed is 'fictionalised' - that is, dramatised and supplemented
with the novelist's invention of thoughts, mental processes,
conversations, even psychological motives.
The first subject translated into fiction by Irving Stone was Vincent
Van Gogh. The Van Gogh novel, Lust for Life, established one of the
more enduring patterns in Stone's fiction - the underdog story, the
tale of someone who is misunderstood by his own time and by subsequent
history.
Stone's Van Gogh is an epileptic depressive, sexually obsessed, a
dweller on the fringes of nineteenth-century French Bohemianism - all
of which made for exciting, somewhat risque fiction by the standards
of 1934, the year of its publication.
Lust for Life was the second of Irving Stone's 27 books written during
a career that was astonishing for its length and productivity. His
first published work - a highly forgettable novel, Pageant of Youth -
appeared in 1933. His last, a biographical novel about the
Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro, was published in 1985.
Irving Stone's original literary passion was for the theatre; in one
year he churned out 17 plays. None of them reached the stage. In 1935
his one produced dramatic work, Truly Valiant, closed after a single
performance.
He also wrote for detective story magazines - the milieu that made the
reputations of Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler. He was the author
of a non- fiction study of Vincent Van Gogh, as well as several other
conventional biographies and a book about unsuccessful American
presidential candidates.
Born in 1903, Stone grew up with the mass market age of American
publishing. Due largely to improvements in public education, there was
an enormous audience for books in the first decade of the twentieth
century. The demand was not so much for the American classics of the
previous 75 years as for a new 'popular' fiction. The mass market
wanted adventure novels and short stories, tales set in exotic,
distant lands and, above all, endings that were both happy and morally
uplifting.
Gene Stratton Porter's novel Freckles sold more than two million
copies in hardcover and reprint editions. Jack London earned dollars
75,000 a year at the peak of his popularity. Rudyard Kipling's
American publishers paid him the highest royalties on record - 30 per
cent of his books' earnings.
As the century progressed, as publishing became a highly profitable
business (for the publishers themselves and the authors who succeeded
in pleasing the American public), a boundary line - both blurred and
controversial - was drawn between popular fiction and literature.
Stone tried to straddle the line. Educated in the California
university system where he studied medicine and then economics, Stone
was a passionate researcher. His original manuscript of Lust for Life
was crammed with every fact he had been able to unearth about Vincent
Van Gogh in Belgium, Holland, England and France.
Ultimately, after his book was rejected by 17 publishers, Stone was
taken in hand by a young editor named Jean Factor. She suggested cuts
and rewriting. The book was sold, published and landed on the New York
Mirror's Sunday bestseller list within four days. Stone married Miss
Factor. She worked with him on all his subsequent books for the next
55 years.
Stone's subjects ranged from Clarence Darrow, the great American civil
libertarian lawyer, to Jack London, Sigmund Freud and the marriage of
Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln.
His most famous novel, The Agony and the Ecstasy, was based on the
life of Michelangelo. Stone and his wife spent two years researching
in Italy. Two more years went into writing. The book was published in
1961. Michelangelo is depicted as a figure too large for the world
around him, a grumpy genius who picked fights with Pope Julius II and
tended to roar - to himself and at other people. Charlton Heston's
portrayal in the 1965 film based on the book was not dissimilar to
Heston's portrayal of Moses.
Irving Stone also wrote about the roles that women played in the lives
of history's great men. In his Lincoln novel, Love is Eternal (1954),
Stone tried to dispel the convention that Mary Todd Lincoln was an
unstable, trigger-tempered harridan who made her husband's life
miserable. Stone wrote biographical novels about the wife of President
Andrew Jackson and about Jessie Fremont, whose husband was a famous
nineteenth-century explorer of the American west and the first (and
unsuccessful) Republican candidate for president.
Irving Stone's explanations of his work were sometimes contradictory.
'My books are based 98 per cent on documentary evidence,' he told one
interviewer. 'I spend several years trying to get inside the brain and
heart of my subjects.'
In another discussion of how he approached his writing he said, 'Even
if there were endless documentation, it would be impossible to know
what a man thought inside his own mind . . . This is where the
novelist's creative imagination has to take over.'
Some of Stone's critics accused him of applying too much creativity in
designing the interior characters and psychology of the real people he
wrote about. Few faulted his factual research and narrative skill.
Alan Nevins, the Pulitzer Prize- winning American historian, said that
Stone's novels had 'given a lively impression of the past to hundreds
of thousands of readers who could have been reached by no method less
vivid and vigorous than his.' It was the ultimate compliment to an
author frequently accused of tailoring biography to the demands of
popular fiction.
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deb...@comcast.net
president. I liked it, anyway...