Styron << STY ruhn >>, William (1925-2006), was an American novelist. Although the settings in his fiction are diverse, Styron has usually been called a Southern writer. His often powerful, elaborate prose reveals the influence of the noted Southern writer William Faulkner.
Styron was born on June 11, 1925, in Newport News, Virginia. His themes reflect the typical Southern writer’s concern for the loss or corruption of such traditional values as family stability, religion, and regional culture. In Styron’s first novel, Lie Down in Darkness (1951), a young woman from Virginia becomes involved in a violent conflict between her parents and runs away from home. She eventually takes her own life, partly as a result of the loss of moral authority represented by the failure of family order.
Styron received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1968 for The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967). In the book, Styron tried to imagine the psychological motivations that drove Turner, a Black minister, to lead a bloody slave revolt in Virginia in 1831 (see Turner, Nat). Sophie’s Choice (1979) deals with a Polish woman who survives the Nazi concentration camps during World War II (1939-1945). She settles in New York City and has a tragic love affair with an emotionally unstable Jewish man. A young Southern writer narrates the story. A Tidewater Morning (1993) is a collection of three interrelated tales. While not strictly autobiographical, they reflect the author’s experiences as a young man growing up in Virginia. Styron also wrote the novelette The Long March (1953) and the novel Set This House on Fire (1960).
A collection of Styron’s essays and other nonfiction pieces was published as This Quiet Dust (1982). A collection of 14 personal essays was published as Havanas in Camelot in 2008, after his death. Styron suffered from mental illness. He wrote an account of this struggle in Darkness Visible (1990). Styron died on Nov. 1, 2006.
