Stone also offered his own support and recognition of writers during his lifetime, serving as Chairman of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation Board of Directors for over thirty years.

Many of his novels are set in unusual, exotic landscapes of raging social turbulence, such as the Vietnam War; a post-coup violent banana republic in Central America; Jim Crow-era New Orleans, and Jerusalem on the verge of the millennium.

In his short story "Absence of Mercy", which he has called autobiographical, the protagonist Mackay is placed at age five in an orphanage described as having had "the social dynamic of a coral reef".

Although he associated with the influential post-Beat Generation writer Ken Kesey and other Merry Pranksters, he was not a passenger on the famous 1964 bus trip to New York, contrary to some media reports.

[17] Living in New York at the time, he met the bus on its arrival and accompanied Kesey to an "after-bus party" whose attendees included a dyspeptic Jack Kerouac.

[16] Stone was appointed an honorary director of the Key West Literary Seminar serving in that capacity during the final decade of his life.

However, at age 72, just after the publication of his second short-story collection Fun With Problems, Stone admitted that he suffered from severe emphysema: "It's my punishment for chain-smoking," he says.

[20] According to his literary agent, Neil Olson,[21] Stone died from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease on January 10, 2015, in Key West,[22] where he and his wife had spent their winters for more than twenty years.

[25] Since his death, a book of collected nonfiction has appeared, and a volume of his work (reprinting together Dog Soldiers, A Flag For Sunrise, and Outerbridge Reach) has been included in the aclaimed Library of America series.

Set in New Orleans in 1960 and based partly on actual events, the novel depicted a political scene dominated by right-wing racism, but its style was more reminiscent of Beat writers than of earlier social realists: alternating between naturalism and stream of consciousness.

[31][32] In contrast to the grand, somewhat satirical adventure epics Stone is commonly associated with, his next two novels were smaller-scale character studies: the misfortunate tale of a Hollywood movie actress in Children of Light, and an eccentric at the midst of a circumnavigation race in Outerbridge Reach (based loosely on the story of Donald Crowhurst), published in 1986 and 1992 respectively.

[7] Stone returned to the complex political novel with Damascus Gate (1998), about a man with messianic delusions caught up in a terrorist plot in Jerusalem.

Besides Ken Kesey, this work features Stone's insights on Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac from his time spent traveling with them.