WILLIAM STYRON
June 11, 1925 -
Nov. 1, 2006
An award-winning novelist and essayist, William Styron established himself as
a successful novelist with his 1951 debut novel, "Lie Down in Darkness," in
which the Virginia native chronicled a dysfunctional family's turbulent lives
and a climactic suicide. The novel was a prize-winning critical triumph for its
young author, but Styron, who served in the Marines near the end of World War
II, was recalled to service in the Korean War. Once discharged, he spent an
extended period in Europe, engaging with other writers including Romain Gary,
George Plimpton, Peter Matthiesson, James Baldwin and James Jones, among others.
The group founded the legendary Paris Review in 1953. Styron's work matured and,
in the late '60s, ventured onto controversial thematic ground with "The
Confessions of Nat Turner," the first-person story of an 1831 slave revolt's
leader, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1968. In 1979's "Sophie's Choice,"
Styron looked at the Holocaust as reflected by its title character, a Polish
Catholic Auschwitz survivor. In 1990, Styron matched his esteem as a novelist
with his haunting memoir, "Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness," in which he
recreated his own horrifying descent into depression in the late 1980s.
(Image: Dominique Nabokov/Opale/Retna Ltd.)
Close
Hotmail
