(It would later be made into a popular film starring Kirk Douglas.) After rejection by more than a dozen publishers, during which time Stone supported himself by writing pulp-detective stories, his Van Gogh biography was finally published in 1934, as Lust for Life, and quickly became a best-selling book. "It was the single most compelling emotional experience of my life," he later said, and immediately embarked on extensive research into the life of the nineteenth-century Impressionist painter. Like many American intellectuals of the period, he spent some time in Paris, where he chanced to see an exhibit of van Gogh's paintings that forever changed his direction. With ambitions to be a dramatist, he moved to New York, but few of his scripts made it to the stage. But he soon abandoned his academic career to indulge his passion for writing. He majored in political science, graduating with honors in 1923, and taught economics at the University of Southern California while working toward his Masters degree there.
In order to continue his education after graduating from high school, Stone took a variety of odd jobs to work his way through the University of California, including saxophone player, fruit picker, meat packer, and hotel clerk.
As a child, Stone was a self-described "hopeless bookworm," who was inspired to be a writer after devouring the work of Jack London, Frank Norris, Sherwood Anderson, and Gertrude Atherton. Irving Stone, who took his family name from his stepfather after his mother's remarriage, was born Irving Tennenbaum in San Francisco, California, on Jto Charles and Pauline Rosenberg Tennenbaum. American political radicals figured in some of Stone's other works, such as Sailor on Horseback: The Biography of Jack London (1938), a book that, in translation, was immensely popular in the former Soviet Union Clarence Darrow for the Defense (1941), and Adversary in the House (1947), an account of Socialist leader Eugene V. Stone also wrote a series of popular fictionalized histories of the nation's First Families: The President's Lady (1951), about Andrew and Rachel Robards Jackson Love Is Eternal (1954), about Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln and Those Who Love (1965), about John and Abigail Smith Adams. A prolific, best-selling author whose entertaining biographical novels and "biohistories" have proved far more popular with readers than with scholars or critics, Irving Stone is best known for works that, in the words of one critic, are pleasing to people who like their history "a little embellished with fiction." By far his two most memorable works are a pair of books that offer monumental, sweeping accounts of the lives of two world-class artists: Lust for Life: A Novel of Vincent van Gogh (1934) and The Agony and the Ecstasy: A Novel of Michelangelo (1961).
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