The Loser’s Loser

Authors

  • Robert Stone Author

Keywords:

Oswald's Tale, Lee Harvey Oswald, John F. Kennedy assassination, American identity, conspiracy theory, tragedy and absurdity, American political culture

Abstract

There are many rootless, open-ended lives in America and many children raised under the shelterless sky of possibility. Lee Harvey Oswald, as he appears in Oswald’s Tale, was a loser’s loser whose chance of fame would always be proportional to his willingness to self-destruct. He would never prove a lover or a hero; his options were only shades of villainy, something that he naturally failed to understand.

Author Biography

  • Robert Stone

    Robert Stone is an American novelist and active participant in the social and political upheaval of the 1960’s. His novel Hall of Mirrors (1967) won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship and the William Faulkner Foundation Award for best first novel, distinctions eventually earning him a Guggenheim Fellowship. Stone covered the Vietnam War as a news correspondent for the British press, and his National Book Award-winning second novel, Dog Soldiers (1974), provides a hallucinogenic and cynical view of human psychology, questioning the morality and honor of people involved in military conflict. Stone’s autobiographical Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties (2007), further explores Stone’s involvement in the countercultural movement and drug scene of the era, and provides a first-hand account of his association with such Beat and hippie icons as Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and Allen Ginsberg.

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Published

2026-03-14

Issue

Vol. 3 No. 1 (2009): Beyond Fiction

Section

Articles