William Styron
William Styron was the white Virginian who wrote Nat Turner's confession in the first person in 1967, won the Pulitzer for it, and was answered by ten Black writers in a book of their own, which is the argument Nat Turner's page says the twentieth century had instead of the nineteenth's. He was born in 1925 at Newport News, the grandson of a slaveholding family, near the Southampton County where Turner's rising had been put down; the local history was his childhood's. He was a Marine lieutenant at the end of the war, was sacked from a publishing job in New York, and wrote Lie Down in Darkness at twenty-five, a novel about a Tidewater family and a suicide that Faulkner's shadow lay over and that made him famous in 1951. He helped found the Paris Review in 1953 and lived the life the magazine implied. The Confessions of Nat Turner took him from the pamphlet Turner dictated in his cell in 1831 and gave the preacher a voice, a sexual fixation on a white girl, and a doubt; it sold enormously, James Baldwin defended it, and William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond, in 1968, called it a theft of a hero and a slander on him. It came at the exact moment the Black Power movement was deciding who could tell whose story. The film was never made. Sophie's Choice in 1979, about a Polish survivor of Auschwitz in Brooklyn and the choice the title names, was the other great success and the other argument, over whether a Catholic Pole was the right survivor; the film followed in 1982. In 1985 he fell into a depression that nearly killed him and wrote Darkness Visible about it in 1990, a short book that did more for the public understanding of the illness than anything a doctor had written. He died on Martha's Vineyard in November 2006, at eighty-one.
- Lived: 1925 CE – 2006 CE
- Nationality: American
- Roles: novelist
