William Styron, 1925 - 2006

The novelist William Styron, was born in Newport News, Virginia, in 1925. He served in the Marines, and then he worked at a publishing house, but he got fired, so he decided to try writing full time. He was only 26 years old when his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness, was published (1951.) It's the story of a young Southern girl who commits suicide, and he wrote it after he heard about the suicide of a girl he used to date, but the critics were convinced that he was the heir to William Faulkner and the next great storyteller of the South. He didn't like this very much; he said, "I don't consider myself in the Southern school, whatever that is," and he said that the main character "didn't have to come from Virginia. She would have wound up jumping from a window no matter where she came from."
He moved to Paris, and he helped found The Paris Review. He wrote a couple of novels that got some attention and mixed reviews, but then he wrote The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), a fictional account of the slave rebellion led by Nat Turner, and it was an influential book, a book that got a lot of attention because it came out at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. The book won a Pulitzer Prize and at first it got great reviews, but then there was a backlash against Styron for his attempt to portray a black man, and people started to question whether he was stereotyping black culture. Styron was upset, and it took more than 10 years for his next novel to be published, the novel Sophie's Choice (1979), about a Polish Catholic Holocaust survivor. It was also a controversial novel, and also a very popular novel; it was at the top of the New York Times Bestseller List and won the American Book Award for fiction.
Styron liked to follow a routine, but unlike many writers who wake up early and write every morning, Styron would sleep until noon, stay in bed for an hour thinking, write in the afternoon, have a late dinner, and then stay up until the middle of the night. He said, "Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever."

*"I thought there's something to be said for honor in this world where there doesn't seem to be any honor left. I thought that maybe happiness wasn't really anything more than the knowledge of a life well spent, in spite of whatever immediate discomfort you had to undergo, and that if a life well spent meant compromises and conciliations and reconciliations, and suffering at the hands of the person you love, well then better that than live without honor."

*Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.

*A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it.

*Writing is a fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats... for jittery people.