Iconic American novelist Robert Stone, author of such critically-acclaimed works of art as Dog Soldiers, succumbed to pulmonary ailment. He died at the age of 77 in Key West on Saturday.

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One of the most highly regarded figures in American letters and forever memorable for his novel Dog Soldiers, he the received a National Book Award in 1975 for that literary effort.

The novel's plot was set both in Vietnam and in California, and depicts the "ruthless diagnosis of the Vietnamization of the homeland," according to Jonathan Lethem who praised the novel for being "a great American masterpiece."

In 1971, Stone was in Vietnam where he worked as correspondent in 1971.

In an interview with Paris Review, Stone recalled his experience while there.

"I was there less than two months, but every day was different. It was the kind of place where anything could have happened," said Stone. "There's nothing that couldn't have happened there."

Stone was born in Brooklyn in 1937 and was raised by a single mother who gave him up to an orphanage years later when she could no longer care for him. In the 1950s, he worked with the Navy and upon discharge went back to New York where he attended New York University for one year, wrote for the Daily News and became an active fixture in the Beat Scene in Greenwich Village.

His first novel, A Hall of Mirrors, hit the book stores in 1967 and was adapted into the big screen in 1970 with the title, WUSA starring Paul Newman.

In 1978, Dog Soldiers was turned into the movie, Who'll Stop the Rain.  In his 1986 novel Children of Light, the author noticeably ridiculed Hollywood.

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