William Styron

American · 1925 to 2006

William Styron was born on June 11, 1925, in Newport News, Virginia, the son of a shipyard engineer with liberal Southern sympathies and a mother who died of cancer when he was thirteen. He was educated at Christchurch School in Tidewater Virginia, then Davidson College, before the wartime Marine Corps V-12 program sent him to Duke University, where he earned a degree in English in 1947. He took a job as an editor at McGraw-Hill in New York, was fired within months, and used the freedom to write his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness, published in 1951 to wide acclaim while he was still in his twenties. Recalled to the Marine Corps during the Korean War, he was discharged in 1952 and settled for a period in Paris, where he helped found The Paris Review with George Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen and became close to a circle that included James Baldwin and Truman Capote. In 1953 he married the poet Rose Burgunder in Rome; they had four children. The Confessions of Nat Turner, a novel narrated by the leader of an 1831 slave rebellion, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1968 and provoked lasting controversy over a white author's claim on a Black historical figure's voice. Sophie's Choice, published in 1979 and drawn partly from his own early years in Brooklyn, won the National Book Award and became one of the defining American novels about the Holocaust. In 1985, in Paris to collect a literary prize, Styron came to the edge of suicide during a severe depressive episode; his recovery and hospitalization became the subject of the memoir Darkness Visible, which helped change how depression was discussed in public. He died of complications from pneumonia on November 1, 2006, at his home on Martha's Vineyard, at the age of eighty-one.