David Derek Stacton (born Arthur Lionel Kingsley Evans, May 27, 1923 – January 19, 1968) was an American novelist, historian and poet.
He served in the Civilian Public Service as a conscientious objector, and wrote a letter as "David Stacton" decrying the compliant American masses to Dwight Macdonald's Politics in 1945.
He changed his name to disassociate himself from his father, and because he believed the surname was unique to him in the United States (as a child he had been known to friends as "Lyonel").
In his first triptych, "The Invincible Questions", Stacton chooses protagonists who are more important for their personal inquiries into the nature of reality than anything that they do, despite being a pharaoh, a king, and monk.
And in his third triptych, Stacton examines, with considerable irony, the eternally fraught relationship between archetypal Man and Woman, beginning with Hindu myth, then looking comically at a famous period romance, and concluding with sad events at a film festival in the recent past.
Stacton had an epigrammatic style and enjoyed a sophisticated irony, although antipathetic critics took him to task for pretentious vocabulary, a tendency to florid paradoxes, and anachronistic allusions (i.e. describing a 14th-century Zen garden using phrases from Marianne Moore and Peter Pan).
[1] His other literary influences include Walter Pater, for his choice of characters with frustrated artistic and emotional longings, and Lytton Strachey for his witty attention to history.
The reaction of the real life figures identifiable in the novel was one reason he left the San Francisco area, more or less permanently, in 1959.