Styron, William 1925-2006

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Styron, William 1925-2006

OBITUARY NOTICE— See index for CA sketch: Born June 11, 1925, in Newport News, VA; died of pneumonia, November 1, 2006, in Martha’s Vineyard, MA. Author. Styron was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author best known for his novels The Confessions of Nat Turner and Sophie’s Choice. After attending Davidson College for a year, he served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1944 to 1945, achieving the rank of first lieutenant. Styron completed his bachelor’s degree at Duke University in 1947 and studied writing briefly at the New School. After graduation, he took a job as an associate editor at the publishing house McGraw-Hill, but soon found success with his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness (1951). The work won him the American Academy of Arts and Letters Prix de Rome. Styron, however, was a slow and methodical writer and did not produce another novel until 1957’s The Long March. This was followed three years later by Set This House on Fire. It was 1967’s The Confessions of Nat Turner that earned him the Pulitzer, as well as the Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Though the book was critically acclaimed as a literary masterpiece, some complained that Styron did not have the right to assume the narration of the novel from the perspective of the African American Turner, whom Styron fictionalized based on the famous leader of the American slave revolt. The author, in turn, replied that artists should be allowed the freedom to express themselves as they saw fit. Sophie’s Choice (1979) earned him the American Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award nomination and was adapted as a 1982 movie. It also drew some protests because Styron wrote about the Holocaust from the viewpoint of a woman who was Catholic, not Jewish. Despite such complaints, Styron was more often praised than criticized, and his rich writing style was sometimes compared to that of William Faulkner. Sophie’s Choice would prove to be the author’s last major work, however, and by the mid-1980s he was struggling with severe depression aggravated by his attempts to treat the illness with the drug Halcion. In 1984 he checked himself into the Yale-New Haven Hospital for treatment, which he would credit with saving his life. He would write about this chapter in his life in Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990).