National Book Award Winner
Dog Soldiers
by Robert Stone
Summary
Set against the closing years of the Vietnam War, the novel follows a disillusioned journalist who agrees to smuggle heroin from Saigon back to California, dragging his friends and family into a spiraling underworld. Stone's prose is taut and noir-inflected, charting the seepage of wartime violence into American counterculture and the moral exhaustion of an entire generation. It remains a defining portrait of the era's collapsing ideals.
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Historical Context & Significance
Widely considered the definitive novel of the 'post-60s comedown', capturing the cynicism and drug culture of the mid-1970s.