Feature Articles

William Styron, 1925-2006
by Brian Kennedy, Customer Service Bibliographer

William Styron, the novelist, playwright, and essayist whose works explored the darker territories of human history and spirit, died on November 1^st at his home on Martha’s Vineyard.  He was 81.

Styron was a Southern writer who struggled throughout his career to break free of the label’s expectations.  “Critics are always linking writers to ‘schools’,” he told The Paris Review in 1954, “If they couldn’t link people to schools, they’d die.”  Yet Styron’s signature talent was in projecting the literary sensibilities of his native region – an innate sense of tragedy, the elegiac, and the grotesque – onto the world at large, discovering in them not the parochial concerns of the American South, but the contours of the human condition.

Styron was uninterested in confining himself to subject-matter deemed appropriate for the writing of a white Southerner.  His attitude, however, was not without its detractors.  His novel The Confessions of Nat Turner not only won the Pulitzer Prize in 1968, but generated a firestorm of controversy from those who felt he had expropriated the suffering and struggle of a martyred black icon.  “We are not quibbling here over footnotes in scholarly journals,” wrote Lerone Bennett, Jr. in William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond, “We are objecting to something more insidious, more dangerous.  We are objecting at a deliberate attempt to steal the meaning of a man’s life.”   

Though stung by the criticism, Styron’s fascination with the acceptable limits of voice and representation continued, culminating a decade later in Sophie’s Choice, his most famous work.  Centered on the sufferings of a Polish Catholic survivor of the Holocaust (and including Auschwitz commandant Rudolph Höss as a character), the novel was made into a celebrated film starring Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline, garnering Streep her second Academy Award.

Styron’s own battles with alcohol and depression, including a near-suicidal breakdown in the mid-1980s, led him to write Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, his last original work.  Its scope outlines his personal acquaintance with the tragic, and his effort to endure “the despair beyond despair.”

Throughout his career he remained fearless, uncompromising, and devoted to his craft. Even in its flaws his work remains, as John Gardner remarked in a review of Sophie’s Choice, “an attempt to seize all the evil in the world – in his own heart first – crush it, and create a planet fit for God and man.”

Below is a list of titles by William Styron, available from YBP and Baker & Taylor. For your convenience, this list is also available in a MS Excel spreadsheet. click here.

CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER