William Styron

William Clark Styron Jr. was an American novelist and essayist, born on June 11, 1925, in the Hilton Village historic district of Newport News, Virginia, and dead on November 1, 2006. He came of age in the American South, in a home marked by more than one point of view. His mother, Pauline Margaret Abraham, was from the North; his father, William Clark Styron, a shipyard engineer, was a Southern liberal. Styron’s birthplace was less than a hundred miles from the site of Nat Turner’s 1831 slave rebellion, a fact that would later connect directly to his most famous and most disputed novel.

Loss and illness entered his life early. His father suffered from clinical depression, as Styron later would. In 1939, when Styron was fourteen, his mother died after a decade-long battle with breast cancer. He attended public schools in Warwick County before his father sent him to Christchurch School, an Episcopal college-preparatory school in Virginia’s Tidewater region. Styron later said that of all the schools he attended, only Christchurch earned not just respect but his “true and abiding affection.” He went on to Davidson College, joined Phi Delta Theta, and by eighteen was reading writers who would shape his own work, especially Thomas Wolfe.

In 1943, Styron transferred to Duke University through the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps V-12 program, which combined basic training with bachelor’s degree study for officer candidates. At Duke, he published his first fiction, a short story strongly influenced by William Faulkner, and placed several stories in the university literary magazine, The Archive, between 1944 and 1946. He became a lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps, but the Japanese surrendered before his ship left San Francisco. After the war, he returned to Duke full time and completed his B.A. in English in 1947.

After graduation, Styron took an editing job at McGraw-Hill in New York City, an experience he later recalled with misery in an autobiographical passage of Sophie’s Choice. After provoking his employers into firing him, he began his first novel in earnest. Lie Down in Darkness, published in 1951, told the story of a dysfunctional Virginia family and received strong critical praise. It brought him the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A Korean War recall delayed his trip; he rejoined the Marine Corps but was discharged in 1952 for eye problems. His time at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, became material for The Long March, published serially the next year and adapted for Playhouse 90 in 1958.

Europe widened Styron’s circle and his subjects. In Paris he became friends with writers including Romain Gary, George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen, James Baldwin, James Jones, and Irwin Shaw. In 1953, that group founded The Paris Review. The same year, Styron finally used his Rome Prize and went to Italy, where he became friends with Truman Capote and married the poet Rose Burgunder in Rome. His experiences abroad fed into Set This House on Fire, published in 1960, a novel about intellectual American expatriates on Italy’s Amalfi coast. It drew mixed reviews in the United States, though its publisher considered its sales successful, and its French translation became a best-seller.

Styron’s best-known book, The Confessions of Nat Turner, appeared in 1967 after years of research and writing. Framed as the fictitious memoirs of Nathaniel “Nat” Turner, the enslaved man who led a slave rebellion in 1831, it arrived during a decade of counterculture politics, civil unrest, racial tension, and opposition to the Vietnam War. Styron signed the 1968 “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, refusing to pay taxes in protest of that war. The novel drew fierce criticism from many Black critics, while James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison publicly defended Styron. It was also a major critical and financial success, winning the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the William Dean Howells Medal in 1970. Styron’s work still holds readers because it joins private grief, moral conflict, and public history in direct, searching prose.