Study Questions

Robert Stone
Prime Green:
Remembering the Sixties

I assigned this book in the hopes that it conveys a sense of the sixties, their meaning for young people who experienced them, and some idea of why they happened and came out the way they did. Also, I hope you find it to be an interesting and enjoyable read.

  1. What does the term "prime green" refer to? Why do you think that Robert Stone chose it as the title for his memoirs?

  2. What did Stone get out of his experience in the navy?

  3. Stone lived in the South at the time that the Civil Rights movement was nearing its peak. What kind of place was it? What were race relations like? Why did he get arrested in Mississippi? What do you think might have happened to him if he really had been registering black people to vote (that is, as an "outside agitator")?

  4. What could happen to a guy who wore a beard and traveled through America in the mid-1960s? What did actually happen to Stone one night in Highspire, Pennsylvania? What does this say about America at the time?

  5. On the Road by Jack Kerouac was one of the most-read books among young people of the time, and its title might often have described a chapter in many young people's lives. Notice how much Stone travels. How do road trips play a major role in his life, and how do they affect his story? What would young people on the road have been looking for? What would they have found?

  6. Drugs played a large role in the minds of young people (figuratively and literally). What was the government's role in actually spreading their use? Why did people like Stone (appropriately named!), Ken Kesey, and their friends do drugs? What were their hopes for drug use? Regarding drug use, how and why did things turn out differently than they thought? By the way, Bono plays a character based on Kesey and has a similar bus in the movie Across the Universe.

  7. California also played a large role in the mind of America in the 1960s, first its L.A. beach and surfer scene in the early years, and later the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco where the hippies converged. Describe the Californian "Eden" that Stone found there. How did it change by the end of the decade? What does Stone think about that change, and what does he think caused it?

  8. Describe the situation in Vietnam when Stone was there. How did he feel about it, and how did the experience affect him?

  9. How did the assassination of President John F. Kennedy affect Stone? Were things different afterwards, and if so, how? Stone's story is repeatedly punctuated by violence, or the threat of violence. What does this say about the deep divisions in America in the sixties?

  10. What is Stone's summation of his experience of the sixties? On balance, was it successful or a failure? Explain.

Page 129: "Life sometimes can be subsumed in magic, although the supply is not inexhaustible." This is a wonderful statement that I have also found to be true, if you put yourself in places (like San Francisco or Paris) that have something special about them.

Robert Stone often seems to assume you're old enough to remember what he does, and what most of his contemporaries recall. Some terms you may not know but might be curious about:

12: Ulysses: James Joyce's famous modernist novel published in 1922.

14: South Africa had a system called "apartheid," a rigid legal separation of the races (three: white, black, and colored) that it based on segregation in the American South.

21: Brigitte Bardot (pronounced bar-DO): French actress and sex symbol of the 1950s

30: Sandy Dennis: American actress and Academy Award winner

31: Dick Tracy: popular comic that originated in the 1930s with Tracy, a police detective, pursuing various eccentric criminals.

42: Wallace Stevens: leading American Modernist poet; Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, et al.: leading poets of the 1950s Beatnik generation.

45: Streetcar: The Oscar-winning 1951 movie A Streetcar Named Desire, directed by Elia Kazan, starring Marlon Brando, Vivian Leigh, Kim Hunter, and Karl Malden, which was set in New Orleans.

46: Brown v. Board: the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which disallowed the racial segregation of public schools.

49: Viola Liuzzo and Mickey Schwerner: Northern whites murdered by Ku Klux Klan members in 1965 and 1964 for coming South to assist with Civil Rights work.

49: Huddie Ledbetter: black folk singer better known as "Leadbelly"; turp camp: camps in the woods collecting pine sap to make turpentine, known for their near-slavery conditions for black workers.

58: Huey Long: flamboyant Louisiana governor and Senator of the 1930s who was a radical populist and ran the state with an iron hand. He was assassinated in the state capitol in 1935.

60: John Brown's Body: an epic poem by Stephen Vincent Benet (pron. benAY) that won the 1929 Pulitzer Prize, and was performed in 1953 on Broadway. The story of the Civil War, the poem takes its name from the title of a Northern Civil War song.

66: Franz Kline, de Kooning: leading painters of the Abstract Expressionist movement, then the dominant art movement, centered in New York City.

69: Wallace Stegner: author, historian, and later (1972) Pulitzer Prize winner and environmentalist.

71: Murphy bed: a bed that folds up into the wall when not in use.

72: fiascoes: traditional Italian straw-covered wine bottle

72: Herb Caen: famous long-time columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle who coined the words "beatnik" and "hippie." He wrote a book entitled Don't Call it Frisco. Regarding Stone's description of San Francisco: in the 1950s women would dress up and put on white gloves to go downtown.

73: Gauloise(s): French cigarette brand; John Coltrane: influential black jazz saxophonist; Lenny Bruce: notorious standup comedian, who would be convicted of obscenity in New York in 1964. Bruce had problems with drugs and died of an overdose in 1966; Hungry i: San Francisco nightclub where many comedians and music acts got started (but today is a strip club).

77: LSD, or LSD-25, or acid, or lysergic acid: lysergic acid diethylamide, an extremely powerful hallucinogenic liquid discovered by Albert Hofmann at Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland in 1938, and derived from ergot, a bread mold.

On many pages: "bohemian": a term associated with artistic communities in large cities like New York, especially in the decade or two after World War II, although as a term it has a much longer history.

81: red-diaper babies: children of 1930s political radicals.

83: Alexander Kerensky: leader of the short-lived Russian republic between the overthrow of the czar in February 1917 and the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917 that established a Communist state; Ten Days That Shook the World was a book by American socialist John Reed that told the story of the Bolshevik Revolution; Stone is referring to the 1927 Russian silent film October: Ten Days That Shook the World.

83: Owsley: Owsley Stanley mass-produced underground LSD for the San Francisco market in the 1960s. It was known for its purity and effectiveness. He was also associated with the Grateful Dead psychedelic rock band. He continued to manufacture LSD after the drug was outlawed in 1966, and was arrested in 1967.

92: Wordsworth: William Wordsworth, major English Romantic poet, who wrote in reference to the French Revolution of 1789, "Bliss was it in that day to be alive, but to be young was very heaven."

102: Mitch Miller: a musician with a popular TV program, Sing Along with Mitch; he wore a mustache and goatee.

120: Le Sacre du printemps: Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring, which caused a riot when it was first performed in Paris in 1913.

123: The New York World's Fair was not the dud Stone describes, at least not for everyone, although it might have been a bit less successful than the Seattle World's Fair of 1962, for which the Space Needle and the Monorail were constructed, and certainly less successful than Expo 67, the amazing world's fair held in Montreal to celebrate Canada's centennial.

125: Algeria revolted against French rule and won independence in 1962.

127: Samuel Beckett: dramatist known for his works in the theater of the absurd, like Waiting for Godot.

136: Alger Hiss: a State Department official accused of being a Soviet spy in 1948; although this was never proved, he was convicted of perjury in 1950 and served time in prison. This was a hugely controversial case in the McCarthy years, and played a role in the rise of Richard Nixon to national prominence.

164: Quotations from Chairman Mao was known as the Little Red Book, and was carried by Red Guards in China during the tumultuous upheaval of the Cultural Revolution of 1966-69.

167: "unnameable archfiend": Leon Trotsky, one of the leaders of the Communist Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Trotsky had a falling out with Stalin; a Soviet agent assassinated him with an ice pick while in exile in Mexico in 1940.

173: De Quincey or Fitzhugh Ludlow: nineteenth-century authors of sensational books: De Quincey was an Englishman who published Confessions of an Opium-Eater in 1821, while Ludlow was the American author of The Hasheesh Eater in 1857.

179: The Catholic (later National) Legion of Decency was an organization that pushed Hollywood to adopt the Hays Code to self-censor its movies in 1933. The Hays Code began to fall apart in the 1960s, resulting in the ratings system that we have today, which was adopted in 1968.

181: Hotel bellboys used to page hotel guests when they had a telephone call, and in the 1930s, a famous advertisement depicted a 4-foot uniformed bellboy stepping into a fancy hotel lobby, calling out "Call for Phillip Morris" (the cigarette company), with a platter with a cigarette pack on it. In the 1950s and early 1960s the actor, Johnny Roventini, and the ad made the transition from radio to television, and so he remained a well-known character for many years.

182: Gerhard Eisler was a German Communist who came to the United States seeking refuge from the Nazis, only to flee the U.S. during the Red Scare after the war in the midst of investigations about his Communist ties.

191: Manson Family: Charles Manson led a cultish commune that committed grisly murders in the L.A. area in 1969, including Sharon Tate, Roman Polanski's pregnant wife, in a house on Cielo Drive; the Manson Family acted on visions inspired by the Beatles' White Album, especially the song "Helter Skelter."

Chapter Sixteen: Most of the locations in Vietnam are all too familiar to my generation, the most important being Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) and Khe Sanh (pron. kay sahn).

211: Graham Greene: famous English writer, author of many books, including The Quiet American (1955).

227: The reference is to the Attica Prison Riot of 1971.