Bancroftiana, Number 123 Fall 2003: Irving Stone’s Lust for Learning

Irving Stone’s Lust for Learning

Irving Stone among the future building blocks of The Stone Wall

The Birth of a Biographical Novel
Paris, 1926. Irving Stone, recently graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, was taken by a friend to an exhibition of works by an obscure Dutch painter named Vincent van Gogh. The vibrant canvases of Vincent van Gogh transfixed the young writer who was spending 15 months in Paris, Antibes, and Florence trying to master the art and craft of the playwright. Upon his return to New York, he became obsessed by the story of van Gogh and determined to write the artist’s story. In order to fund a return trip to Europe to study van Gogh, Stone turned to crime fiction, writing six murder stories in six days. Five of them sold and Stone had enough money to follow Vincent’s trail. After six months of research, and another six months of writing, Stone believed his manuscript, a biographical novel entitled Lust for Life, was ready for publication. Over the next three years, 17 different publishers rejected it.

Meanwhile, Stone was still trying to make a living in the theater. While directing a play, he met a young amateur actress named Jean Factor. They began dating and, since she had previously been a private secretary, Stone gave her the manuscript to edit. She cut it by ten per cent and in January 1934, on the 18th try, it was accepted for publication. The publisher’s advance paid for Irving and Jean’s honeymoon, and the book came out to critical and popular acclaim that September.

The Development of a Writer
Irving Stone was born in San Francisco on July 14, 1903, the son of Charles and Pauline (Rosenberg) Tannenbaum. His parents divorced when he was seven years old, and he legally changed his last name when his mother remarried. The family was poor, and young Irving helped with the family finances by driving a grocery delivery wagon, selling newspapers, working in a milk depot on Haight Street, fold- ing and delivering men’s suits for a clothing store, and ushering in movie theaters.

When he was twelve, Stone and his mother journeyed across San Francisco Bay to visit the University of California campus in Berkeley. While there, Pauline Stone made her son promise that he would attend the university and earn a degree. Irving fulfilled that promise by entering the university in August 1920 and graduating four years later with honors in political science and economics. He followed that by earning an M.A. in economics at the University of Southern California and returning to Berkeley in 1924 to pursue a Ph.D. The urge to write was too strong, however, and after winning a theater prize for one of his plays in 1926, Stone left the university to go abroad.

In Lust for Life Irving Stone found his literary voice. With that book, he made his first foray into a literary form that would become uniquely his own—the biographical novel. It was also the beginning of a life-long collaboration between Irving, the author, and Jean, the editor. Jean edited every one of Irving’s subsequent manuscripts; he repaid her efforts by dedicating each book (after Lust for Life, which was dedicated to his mother) to her.

The Body of Work
Following van Gogh, Stone’s fictionalized subjects included Jessie Benton and John Charles Frémont (Immortal Wife, 1944), Michelangelo Buonarroti (The Agony and the Ecstasy, 1961), Sigmund Freud (Passions of the Mind, 1971), Charles Darwin (The Origin, 1980), and French Impressionist Camille Pissarro (Depths of Glory, 1985).

Stone also wrote popular biographies and histories and edited several volumes, including a collection of essays about the University of California by noted alumni entitled There Was Light (1970). Jean Stone edited the updated edition published in 1996.

The Irving Stone Collection and the Jean and Irving Stone Seminar Room
Irving Stone was noted as a meticulous researcher, often spending several years studying his subject before beginning to write. The Stones’ research repeatedly brought them back to the collections of The Bancroft Library. Thus, it was fitting that Jean Stone funded the creation of the Jean and Irving Stone Seminar Room in 1996. The purpose of the room is to provide meeting and study space, in addition to housing the Irving Stone Collection, Jean Stone’s library of her husband’s works. The principal feature of the room, located on the second floor of Bancroft, is The Stone Wall, which is populated with nearly 500 editions and translations of Stone’s books, along with a portion of his impressive research library.

This year, in addition to being the centennial of Stone’s birth and the 70th anniversary of the publication of his first book, Pageant of Youth (a fictional account of Stone’s days as an undergraduate), marks the completion of the cataloging of the Irving Stone Collection. Not only can visitors to the Stone Room view the full range of Stone’s literary output, but also all of the books shelved on The Stone Wall and his entire research collection may now be located in the library cataloges of the University of California.

—Randal Brandt