STYRON, William Clark, Jr.

(b. 11 June 1925 in Newport News, Virginia), award-winning novelist who created a storm of controversy with his fictionalized account of an 1831 slave insurrection, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), and whose other works examine pain, self-knowledge, and evil through a masterly control of diverse points of view.

Styron was the only child of William Clark Styron, an engineer at the Newport News shipyards, and Pauline Margaret Abraham Styron, a musician who died after a ten-year struggle with breast cancer when her son was barely fourteen. Styron then boarded at Christchurch, an Episcopal boys' school in Virginia, and continued as a self-described "indifferent student" at Davidson College from 1942 to 1943. He served in the United States Marine Corps from 1944 through 1945; he was briefly recalled to active duty in 1951 during the Korean conflict. Styron completed his education at Duke University, earning a bachelor's degree in 1947.

Critical acclaim followed the publication of Styron's first novel, Lie Down in Darkness (1951), which owed much to the influence of William Faulkner. Styron sailed to Europe, where he became a founding member of the literary journal the Paris Review and wrote the statement of purpose in its first issue. On 4 May 1953 he married Rose Burgunder, a poet and social activist. They moved to Roxbury, Connecticut, in October 1954 and began raising a daughter, the first of their four children.

From 1954 Styron worked on his second novel, Set This House on Fire (1960). Early in the novel the American narrator in Italy, Peter Leverett, articulates a perspective that may account for the behavior of many Americans in the restless decade of the 1960s: "[W]e Americans are… nervous and driven [because] … our past is effaced almost before it is made present; … almost nothing remains for us to feel or see, or to absorb our longing." Although the novel was only moderately successful in the United States, its French translation (La proie des flammes) was highly praised and hugely successful.

Publication of The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) was both an effect and a cause of racial unrest, which Styron called "the storm center of the most inflammatory public issue in the U.S." As a child, he had seen a commemorative plaque referring to the 1831 slave rebellion; as an adult, he reflected on the segregated society in which he had grown up. His intellectual curiosity inspired his interest in researching the Turner rebellion, and with perceptive sensitivity he created a fictionalized spokesman for the Negroes both in the 1830s and in the present time. Styron wrote in Harper's (April 1965) that he wanted "to break down the old law, to come to know the Negro," a knowledge that is "the moral imperative of every white Southerner." He received the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for Nat Turner and an honorary degree from the historically African-American Wilberforce University. Many black writers, however, resented Styron's choice to speak from Turner's point of view; they attacked the numerous details he created in describing the motivations and background of Nat Turner, about whom little is known. The African-American novelist James Baldwin, however, affirmed Styron's approach when he wrote, "He has begun the common history—ours." Styron remembers being influenced by the American civil rights leader and writer W. E. B. DuBois's statement in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) that "the color line" would be the central problem of the United States in the twentieth century. "I believed it when I wrote Nat Turner and I still believe it," Styron said in 1992.

Calling himself a "dissenting Democrat," Styron contributed five words to President Lyndon Baines Johnson's 1964 civil rights speech: "our unending search for justice." He traveled to the famously confrontational August 1968 Democratic convention to argue the case that one candidate, Senator Eugene McCarthy, deserved more official delegates. A committee, however, denied the point, thus preventing Styron and others from being those pro-McCarthy delegates. He did, however, remain in Chicago and witnessed the rioting that ensued when police tried to break up antiwar demonstrations in the streets outside the convention. Further, he acted as a witness for Abbie Hoffman, one of the famous Chicago Eight who stood trial for inciting a riot. J. Edgar Hoover, head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had started a file on Styron as early as 1961, when he and James Baldwin wrote a public letter protesting Hoover's defense of the death penalty. The file was kept current at least through April 1970; it included references to the 1968 Democratic convention and Styron's "associations with people of leftist sympathies."

Styron epitomized the sixties in his themes—racial unrest and self-knowledge—and in his actions. From slavery and segregation to the Holocaust, he focused on subjects carrying great emotional weight in the turbulent decade. His first extended article on a social issue, "The Death-in-Life of Benjamin Reid," published in Esquire in February 1962, maintained that the death penalty was illogical and inappropriate. He wrote, "As for Ben Reid, in arbitrarily inflicting upon him the sentence of death, in denying him even the chance of rehabilitation that we have just as arbitrarily granted others, we have committed a manifest injustice; and the death penalty, once again, reveals its ignoble logic." In 1970 Styron received the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, concluding the decade in which he was both heavily attacked and greatly praised.

Styron first compared American slavery and the Nazi death camps in a magazine article he wrote in 1963. He wrote a New York Times op-ed article in 1974, "Auschwitz's Message," reflecting on anti-Semitism, Christian guilt, and Hitler's gentile victims. His broader interpretation was that the death camps were not merely anti-Jewish; they were "anti-human. Anti-life." This idea became a guiding theme in Sophie's Choice (1979), which was made into a successful film. The narrator is Stingo, a New Yorker who comes to know Sophie Zawistowska and finally to understand her anguished response to imprisonment by the Nazis.

Styron's third major work resulted from an encounter at age sixty with a major depressive episode that neither therapy nor drugs relieved. He described the experience of his illness in the memoir Darkness Visible (1990). Since that time he has advocated tirelessly to erase the stigma attached to depression and other mental illnesses.

Perhaps the most significant of Styron's contributions is his daring use of the narrative persona. He has made all of us see the world through the eyes of the Reverend Nat Turner and the eyes of Stingo and of anyone going through the horrors of depression. Styron continues to work on his novel in progress, The Way of the Warrior, dividing his time between homes on Martha's Vineyard and in Roxbury. He and his wife still pursue their long-term advocacy of Amnesty International.

Styron's papers are collected at Duke University and the Library of Congress. The excellent 1998 biography by James L. W. West III, William Styron: A Life, is supplemented by West's edited texts in Conversations with William Styron (1985), some of which are translated from French interviews. Critical works about The Confessions of Nat Turner include John Henrik Clarke, ed., William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond (1987), and James Baker, Nat Turner: Cry Freedom in America (1998). For critical appraisal of all of Styron's works, see Samuel Coale, William Styron Revisited (1991); Daniel William Ross, The Critical Response to William Styron (1995); and Abigail Cheever, "Prozac Americans: Depression, Identity, and Selfhood," Twentieth Century Literature 46 (Fall 2000): 346.

Dessa Crawford