Styron, William 1925–

PERSONAL: Born June 11, 1925, in Newport News, VA; son of William Clark (a shipyard engineer) and Pauline (Abraham) Styron; married Rose Burgunder, May 4, 1953; children: Susanna, Paola, Thomas, Alexandra. Education: Attended Christchurch School, Middlesex County, VA, and Davidson College, NC, 1942–43; Duke University, B.A., 1947; studied writing at New School for Social Research, 1947. Politics: Democrat.

ADDRESSES: Home—12 Rucum Road, Roxbury, CT 06783, and Vineyard Haven, MA (summer).

CAREER: Writer. McGraw-Hill Book Co. (publishers), New York, NY, associate editor, 1947. Fellow of Silliman College, Yale University, 1964–. Honorary consultant in American Letters to the Library of Congress. Cannes Film Festival, jury president, 1983. American Scholar, member of editorial board, 1970–76; advisory editor of Paris Review. Military service: U.S. Marine Corps, World War II, 1944–45; became first lieutenant; recalled briefly in 1951.

MEMBER: National Institute of Arts and Letters, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Letters (inducted, 1988), Society of American Historians, Signet Society of Harvard (honorary), Academie Goncourt, Phi Beta Kappa.

AWARDS, HONORS: American Academy of Arts and Letters Prix de Rome, 1952, for Lie down in Darkness; Litt.D., Duke University, 1968, and Davidson College (Davidson, NC), 1986; Pulitzer Prize, 1968, and How-ells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1970, both for The Confessions of Nat Turner; American Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award nominee, both 1980, both for Sophie's Choice; Connecticut Arts Award, 1984; Cino del Duca prize, 1985; Commandeur, Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France), 1987; Edward MacDowell Medal, 1988; Bobst Award, 1989; National Magazine award, 1990; National Medal of Arts, 1993; Medal of Honor, National Arts Club, 1995; Commonwealth Award, 1995.

WRITINGS:

Lie Down in Darkness, Bobbs-Merrill (Indianapolis, IN), 1951.

The Long March, Vintage (New York, NY), 1957.

Set This House on Fire, Random House (New York, NY), 1960.

The Confessions of Nat Turner, Random House (New York, NY), 1967.

Sophie's Choice, Random House (New York, NY), 1979.

PLAYS

In the Clap Shack (three-act play; first produced at Yale Repertory Theatre, 1972), Random House (New York, NY), 1973.

OTHER

The Four Seasons, illustrated by Harold Altman, Pennsylvania State University Press (University Park, PA), 1965.

Admiral Robert Penn Warren and the Snows of Winter: A Tribute, Palaemon Press (Winston-Salem, NC), 1978.

The Message of Auschwitz, Press de la Warr (Blacks-burg, VA), 1979.

Against Fear, Palaemon Press (Winston-Salem, NC), 1981.

The Achievement of William Styron (autobiography), edited by Robert K. Morris with Irving Malin, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 1981.

This Quiet Dust, and Other Writings (essays), Random House (New York, NY), 1982.

(Author of introduction) Robert Satter, Doing Justice: A Trial Judge at Work, American Lawyer Books/Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1990.

Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, Random House (New York, NY), 1990.

A Tidewater Morning: Three Tales from Youth, Random House (New York, NY), 1993.

(With Mariana Ruth Cook) Fathers and Daughters: In Their Own Words, Chronicle Books (San Francisco, CA), 1994.

(With James L.W. West III) William Styron, a Life, Random House (New York, NY), 1998.

(With others) Dead Run: The Untold Story of Dennis Stockton and America's Only Mass Escape from Death Row, Times Books (New York, NY), 1999.

Also author of Inheritance of the Night: Early Drafts of "Lie Down in Darkness," Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 1993. Editor of Paris Review: Best Short Stories, Dutton (New York, NY), 1959. Contributor to Esquire, New York Review of Books, and other publications.

Manuscript collections of Styron's work are held by the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, and Duke University, Durham, NC.

ADAPTATIONS: Sophie's Choice was adapted for film, Universal Pictures, 1982; it featured Meryl Streep in the title role.

SIDELIGHTS: William Styron's novels have brought him major literary awards, broad critical notice, and a reputation for raising controversial issues. Writtten in the style of the Southern Gothic tradition made familiar by author William Faulkner, Styron's work has been described as both reckless and poetic, and his subject matter has been the focus of debate. In The Confessions of Nat Turner and Sophie's Choice, he wrote about victims of oppression: a slave and a concentration camp survivor. Although some critics have questioned his approach and his ability to enter the mind of a black slave or a mother in the Holocaust, most have praised Styron for probing into difficult subjects. Reviewers often consider Styron's timing a positive factor in the success of these two books; Sophie's Choice, published during renewed concern about the Holocaust, and The Confessions of Nat Turner, published during the racially explosive late 1960s, each found large audiences. George Steiner commented in the New Yorker: "The crisis of civil rights, the new relationships to each other and to their own individual sensibilities that this crisis has forced on both whites and Negroes … give Mr. Styron's fable [The Confessions of Nat Turner] a special relevance."

Styron based The Confessions of Nat Turner on the transcript of testimony given by a slave, Nat Turner, who had led a brief revolt against slave owners in Virginia's Tidewater district. Styron considered his book a "meditation on history" rather than a strict retelling of events. He explained in a letter to the Nation that "in writing The Confessions of Nat Turner I at no time pretended that my narrative was an exact transcription of historical events; had perfect accuracy been my aim I would have written a work of history rather than a novel." Philip Rahv asserted that Styron's viewpoint was more valuable than a historical perspective. Rahv wrote in the New York Review of Books: "This narrative is something more than a novelistic counterpart of scholarly studies of slavery in America; it incarnates its theme, bringing home to us the monstrous reality of slavery in a psychodynamic manner that at the same time does not in the least neglect social or economic aspects."

Styron's subjective approach drew ire from critics who felt that his portrait of Nat is based on white stereotypes. A Negro Digest critic took particular issue with Styron's depiction of Nat's sexuality: "In the name of fiction, Mr. Styron can do whatever he likes with History. When his interpretation, however, duplicates what is white America's favorite fantasy (i.e., every black male—especially the leader—is motivated by a latent [?] desire to sleep with the Great White Woman), he is obligated to explain … this coincidental duplication—or to be criticized accordingly. Since there is no such explanation in the technique of the novel and since it offers no vision or new perspective, but rather reaffirms an old stale, shameful fantasy … it is at best a good commercial novel." Albert Murray concurred in the New Leader: "Alas, what Negroes will find in Styron's 'confessions' is much the same old failure of sensibility that plagues most other fiction about black people. That is to say, they will all find a Nat Turner whom many white people may accept at a safe distance, but hardly one with whom Negroes will easily identify."

Styron wrote about human suffering in a more contemporary setting—post-World War II Brooklyn—in Sophie's Choice. Sophie is a beautiful Polish gentile who survived Auschwitz but lost two of her children and much of her self-esteem there. Her lover, Nathan—mad, brilliant, and Jewish—is haunted by the atrocities of the Holocaust, although he personally escaped them, and he torments Sophie with reminders. Stingo, a young writer who lives downstairs from Sophie and Nathan, narrates. According to Geoffrey Wolff in Esquire, "Stingo is in the tradition of The Great Gatsby's Nick Carraway. Like Nick, he bears witness to the passion of characters he chances upon and tries modestly to judge and pardon. Like Nick, he is a refugee from settled values—Virginia's Tidewater country—back from a great war to make his way in the great world."

David Caute in the New Statesman heard additional voices. For Caute, in Styron's prose the "neo-Biblical cadences of Southern prose, of Wolfe and Faulkner, jostle … with the cosmopolitan sensibility of an F. Scott Fitzgerald." Other critics agreed that the influence of other writers sometimes muffles Styron's own voice. Jack Beatty wrote in the New Republic that Sophie's Choice "is written in an unvaryingly mannered style—High Southern—that draws constant spell-destroying attention to itself." The High Southern style associated with Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe is characterized by elaborate, even Gothic descriptions, and although Styron is "a novelist hard to categorise," he shows his "allegiance to that style … in all … [his] writing," according to Caute, with "a reluctance to leave any noun uncaressed by an adjective." Paul Gray, reviewing Sophie's Choice in Time, agreed, noting that Styron "often let Stingo pile up adjectives in the manner of Thomas Wolfe: 'Brooklyn's greenly beautiful, homely, teeming, begrimed and incomprehensible vastness'…. True, Stingo is pictured as a beginning writer, heavily in debt to Faulkner, Wolfe and the Southern literary tradition, but Styron may have preserved more redundant oratory than the effect of Stingo's youth strictly required."

Robert Towers, writing in the New York Review of Books, also faulted Styron for verbosity. "'All my life, I have retained a strain of uncontrolled didacticism,' says Stingo at one point," Towers noted, "and Sophie's Choice bears him out. The novel is made to drag along an enormous burden of commentary, ranging all the way from the meaning of the Holocaust, the ineluctable nature of evil, the corrosive effects of guilt, the horrors of slavery, and the frailty of goodness and hope to such topics as the misunderstanding of the South by Northern liberals, Southern manners as opposed to those of New York taxi drivers, and the existence of prejudice and cruelty in even the best of us." But Wolff defended Styron, observing that "the book's narrative flow is suspenseful if languid, if sometimes even glacial," and that Sophie's Choice "achieved an almost palpable evocation of its place and time—Poland before and during the war, Brooklyn and Coney Island immediately after." Caute, despite his criticisms, contended that Styron's prose is "marked also by clarity, honesty and accessibility."

In response to critics who questioned the validity of Confessions and Sophie's Choice on the grounds of Sty-ron's personal background, Towers argued that "it should not be necessary to defend the right of Styron—a non-Jew, a Southern Protestant in background—to this subject matter—any more than his right to assume, in the first person, the 'identity' of the leader of a slave rebellion in Virginia in 1831." Gray agreed. "The question," he wrote in Time, "is not whether Styron has a right to use alien experiences but whether his novel proves that he knows what he is writing about. In this instance, the overriding answer is yes."

It cannot be said of Styron's 1990 work Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness that the author was writing of "alien experiences," as he had first-hand knowledge of the book's focus. Darkness Visible is Styron's account of his slow fall into depression in 1985. Leading up to his experience was the loss of his mother when he was thirteen, his father's own battle with depression, and Styron's forty-year dependency on alcohol. According to an interview with Laurel Graeber in the New York Times Book Review, the catalyst for Styron's account of his depression was his defense of the writer Primo Levi, who committed suicide in 1987. "Styron found himself defending Levi … from statements that seemed to attribute his action to moral weakness," wrote Graeber. Following an essay he published on the subject, Styron spoke on it, wrote a longer article, and then produced Darkness Visible.

Styron was compelled, "in romantic confessional style, that he had to write it, and it is good to have it," stated Karl Miller in his review of Darkness Visible for the London Review of Books. Noting that the book contains "some tremendous writing," Victoria Glendinning added that "The rhythmic beat of some sentences demands that they be read aloud," in a review for the New York Times Book Review. Miller noted that "There are passages in the book which might have been written in the nineteenth century—some of them, give or take a word or two, by Poe…. Styron writes of the dungeons 'of his spirit,' of a 'long-beshrouded metaphysical truth'—language that belongs to the Gothic strain of certain of his fictions."

A Tidewater Morning: Three Tales from Youth was Styron's first work following his depression and recovery. The three stories are autobiographical in nature and are narrated by a man in his fifties. The title novella takes place in 1938, the year Styron's own mother died, and focuses on a thirteen-year-old boy who watches his mother die of cancer. In the story "Love Day" the narrator recalls his experience in the U.S. Marines as a young man of twenty. The third story tells of a ten-year-old's friendship with neighbors who are descended from a prominent Southern family but have fallen onto harder times. The story "Shadrach" portrays a ninety-year-old former slave who returns to the family's land to die. James L.W. West III in Sewanee Review compared the collection to Faulkner's Go down, Moses and Hemingway's In Our Time, due to the connectedness of the stories "in ways obvious and subtle: this arrangement gives them a cumulative weight and thematic resonance that they would not possess if read separately." According to West, "The strongest cords binding these stories together are thematic. Styron is working through familiar territory for him, contemplating the fearful mysteries of grief, remorse, memory, guilt, rebellion, warfare, and death…. At crucial points … [the narrator] lifts himself above his doubt or pain, and fashions an imaginative rendering of the moment. This, Styron seems to be telling us, is the only way finally to address some of the almost intolerable ambiguities and injustices of our time."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Bryer, Jackson R., and Mary B. Hatem, William Styron: A Reference Guide, G.K. Hall (Boston, MA), 1978.

Casciato, Arthur D., and James L.W. West III, editors, Critical Essays on William Styron, G.K. Hall (Boston, MA), 1982.

Cologne-Brookes, Gavin, The Novels of William Styron: From Harmony to History, Louisiana State University (Baton Rouge, LA), 1995.

Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography: Broadening Views, 1968–1988, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1989.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 1, 1973, Volume 3, 1975, Volume 11, 1979, Volume 15, 1980, Volume 60, 1990.

Cowley, Malcolm, Writers at Work: The "Paris Review" Interviews, First Series, Viking (New York, NY), 1958.

Crane, John K., The Root of All Evil: The Thematic Unity of William Styron's Fiction, University of South Carolina Press (Columbia, SC), 1985.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 143: American Novelists since World War II, Third Series, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1994.

Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1980, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1981.

Friedman, Melvin J., William Styron, Bowling Green University (Bowling Green, OH), 1974.

Geismar, Maxwell, American Moderns, Hill & Wang (New York, NY), 1958.

Hadaller, David, Gynicide: Women in the Novels of William Styron, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press (Madison, NJ), 1996.

Kostelanetz, Richard, editor, On Contemporary Literature, Avon (New York, NY), 1964.

Leon, Philip W., William Styron: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1978.

Mackin, Cooper R., William Styron, Steck Vaughn (Austin, TX), 1969.

Malin, Irving, and Robert K. Morris, editors, The Achievement of William Styron, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 1975, revised edition, 1981.

Pearce, Richard, William Styron ("Pamphlets on American Writers" series), University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1971.

Ratner, Marc L., William Styron, Twayne (New York, NY), 1972.

Ross, Daniel William, The Critical Response to William Styron, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1995.

Ruderman, Judith, William Styron, Ungar (New York, NY), 1989.

Short Story Criticism, Volume 25, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1997.

Waldmeir, Joseph J., editor, Recent American Fiction, Michigan State University Press (Lansing, MI), 1963.

West, James L. W., III, William Styron: A Descriptive Bibliography, G.K. Hall (Boston, MA), 1977.

West, James L. W., III, William Styron: A Life, Random House (New York, NY), 1998.

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, July 3, 1989.

Chicago Tribune Book World, May 27, 1979; January 16, 1983.

College Literature, number 1, 1987, pp. 1-16.

Commonweal, December 22, 1967.

Critique, number 2, 1985, pp. 57-65.

Detroit News, June 24, 1979.

English Journal, April, 1996, p. 87.

Esquire, July 3, 1979; December 1, 1985.

Harper's, July, 1967.

Journal of the American Medical Association, March 6, 1991, pp. 1184-1185.

London Review of Books, March 21, 1991, p. 6.

Los Angeles Times, December 14, 1983.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, January 16, 1983.

Mississippi Quarterly, number 2, 1989, pp. 129-145.

Nation, October 16, 1967; April 22, 1968; July 7, 1979.

New Leader, December 4, 1967.

New Republic, June 30, 1979.

New Statesman, May 7, 1979; November 19, 1993, pp. 47-48.

New Statesman & Society, March 8, 1991, pp. 37-38.

Newsweek, October 16, 1967; May 28, 1979.

New Yorker, November 25, 1967; June 18, 1979.

New York Review of Books, October 26, 1967; September 12, 1968; July 19, 1979.

New York Times, August 5, 1967; October 3, 1967; May 29, 1979; November 27, 1982.

New York Times Book Review, October 8, 1967; August 11, 1968; May 27, 1979; June 6, 1982; November 21, 1982; December 12, 1982; August 19, 1990.

Observer Review, May 5, 1968.

Partisan Review, winter, 1968; summer, 1968.

Sewanee Review, spring, 1994.

Southern Literary Journal, fall, 2001, p. 56.

Southern Quarterly, winter, 2002, Edwin T. Arnold, "The William Styron-Donald Harington Letters," pp. 98-141.

Southern Review, autumn, 2001, Michael Mewshaw, "A Writer's Account," p. 790.

Spectator, October 13, 1979.

Time, October 13, 1967; June 11, 1979.

Times Literary Supplement, May 19, 1968; November 30, 1979; June 10, 1983; December 10, 1993, p. 19.

Twentieth Century Literature, fall, 2000, Abigail Cheever, "Prozac Americans: Depression, Identity, and Selfhood," p. 346; fall, 2001, Lis Carstens, "Sexual Politics and Confessional Testimony in Sophie's Choice," p. 293.

Village Voice, December 14, 1967.

Voice of Youth Advocates, February, 1994, p. 374.

Washington Post, May 18, 1979; January 4, 1983.

Washington Post Book World, May 29, 1979; December 5, 1982.

Whole Earth Review, fall, 1995, p. 41.

Yale Review, winter, 1968.