William Styron Books In Order

The Confessions of Nat Turner

In the late summer of 1831, in a remote section of southeastern Virginia, there took place the only effective, sustained revolt in the annals of American Negro slavery…
The revolt was led by a remarkable Negro preacher named Nat Turner, an educated slave who felt himself divinely ordained to annihilate all the white people in the region. The Confessions of Nat Turner is narrated by Nat himself as he lingers in jail through the cold autumnal days before his execution. The compelling story ranges over the whole of Nat’s Life, reaching its inevitable and shattering climax that bloody day in August. The Confessions of Nat Turner is not only a masterpiece of storytelling; is also reveals in unforgettable human terms the agonizing essence of Negro slavery. Through the mind of a slave, Willie Styron has re created a catastrophic event, and dramatized the intermingled miseries, frustrations and hopes which caused this extraordinary black man to rise up out of the early mists of our history and strike down those who held his people in bondage. From the Hardcover edition.

Lie Down in Darkness

William Styron traces the betrayals and infidelities the heritage of spite and endlessly disappointed love that afflict the members of a Southern family and that culminate in the suicide of the beautiful Peyton Loftis. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Set This House on Fire

The day after Peter Leverett met his old friend Mason Flagg in Italy, Mason was found dead. The hours leading up to his death were a nightmare for Peter both in their violence and in their maddening unreality. The blaze of events which followed was, Peter soon realised, ignited by a conflict between two men: Mason Flagg himself and Cass Kinsolving, a tortured, self destructive painter, a natural enemy and prey to the monstrous evil of Mason Flagg. Three events murder, rape and suicide explode in the is relentless and passionate novel, almost overwhelming in its conception of the varieties of good and evil.

Sophie’s Choice

‘ One morning in the early spring, I woke up with the remembrance of a girl I’d once known, Sophie. It was a very vivid half dream, half revelation, and all of a sudden I realized that hers was a story I had to tell.’ That very day, William Styron began writing the first chapter of Sophie’s Choice. First published in 1979, this complex and ambitious novel opens with Stingo, a young southerner, journeying north in 1947 to become a writer. It leads us into his intellectual and emotional entanglement with his neighbors in a Brooklyn rooming house: Nathan, a tortured, brilliant Jew, and his lover, Sophie, a beautiful Polish woman whose wrist bears the grim tattoo of a concentration camp…
and whose past is strewn with death that she alone survived. ‘Sophie’s Choice is a passionate, courageous book…
a philosophical novel on the most important subject of the twentieth century,’ said novelist and critic John Gardner in The New York Times Book Review. ‘One of the reasons Styron succeeds so well in Sophie’s Choice is that, like Shakespeare I think the comparison is not too grand, Styron knows how to cut away from the darkness of his material, so that when he turns to it again it strikes with increasing force…
. Sophie’s Choice is a thriller of the highest order, all the more thrilling for the fact that the dark, gloomy secrets we are unearthing one by one sorting through lies and terrible misunderstandings like a hand groping for a golden nugget in a rattlesnake’s nest may be authentic secrets of history and our own human nature.’The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foun dation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hard bound editions of important works of liter ature and thought. For the Modern Library’s seventy fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring as its emblem the running torchbearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inau gurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world’s best books, at the best prices.

Inheritance of Night

From 1947 to 1949, William Styron twice attempted to write a novel under the working title Inheritance of Night. On the third attempt he produced the award winning Lie Down in Darkness, which when published in September 1951 established him as one of the most promising writers of his generation. Duke University Press is proud to publish, in facsimile form, the long lost drafts of Styron’s earliest versions of Lie Down in Darkness. Although Styron began the narrative twice, he realized both times that his writing was derivative and his characters not yet fully conceived. These drafts show young Stryon feeling his way into the story with various narrative voices and strategies, and attempting to work out his plot. Influence from William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Robert Penn Warren is apparent in the text, and there is a character present named Marcus Bonner who is an early rendition of Stingo in Sophie’s Choice. The typescript drafts of Inheritance of Night for many years were thought to have been lost, but in 1980 were discovered in the files of one of Styron’s former literary agents. These drafts, eventually made their way to the archive of Styron’s papers assembled at Duke University Library. This facsimile is published here in two different limited editions for collectors: a lettered, signed, and boxed edition 26 copies and a numbered, signed edition 250. A general interest trade volume is also available. With a preface by Styron and an introduction by James L. W. West III, these drafts afford much insight into the creation of Lie Down in Darkness and the writing of a major twentieth century American writer.

This Quiet Dust

Profound and passionate essays from one of America’s greatest literary voices of the twentieth century This Quiet Dust is a compilation of William Styron s nonfiction writings that confront significant moral questions with precision and vigor. He examines topics as diverse as the Holocaust, the American Dream, and the controversy that raged around his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner. In each entry, Styron expertly wields his powers of insight to slice through the most complex issues. This Quiet Dust offers a window into the philosophical underpinnings of Styron s greatest novels and is the ideal entry for readers seeking a greater understanding into the work of one of America s most celebrated authors. This ebook features a new illustrated biography of William Styron, including original letters, rare photos, and never before seen documents from the Styron family and the Duke University Archives.

Long March / in the Clap Shack

Two extraordinary works about soldiers in a time of dubious peace by a writer of vast eloquence and moral authority. With stylistic panache and vitriolic wit, William Styron depicts conflicts between men of somewhat more than average intelligence and the military machine. In The Long March, a novella, two Marine reservists fight to retain their dignity while on a grueling exercise staged by a posturing colonel. The uproariously funny play In the Clap Shack charts the terrified passage of a young recruit through the prurient inferno of a Navy hospital VD ward. In both works, Styron wages a gallant defense of the free individual and serves up a withering indictment of a system that has no room for individuality or freedom.

A Tidewater Morning

In this brilliant collection of ‘long short stories, ‘ the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Sophie’s Choice returns to the coastal Virginia setting of his first novels. Through the eyes of a man recollecting three episodes from his youth, William Styron explores with new eloquence death, loss, war, and racism. From the Trade Paperback edition.

The Suicide Run

Before writing his memoir of madness, Darkness Visible, William Styron was best known for his ambitious works of fiction including The Confessions of Nat Turner and Sophie’s Choice. Styron also created personal but no less powerful tales based on his real life experiences as a U.S. Marine. The Suicide Run collects five of these meticulously rendered narratives. One of them Elobey, Annob n, and Corisco is published here for the first time.

In Blankenship, written in 1953, Styron draws on his stint as a guard at a stateside military prison at the end of World War II. Marriott, the Marine and The Suicide Run which Styron composed in the early 1970s as part of an intended novel that he set aside to write Sophie s Choice depict the surreal experience of being conscripted a second time, after World War II, to serve in the Korean War. My Father s House captures the isolation and frustration of a soldier trying to become a civilian again. In Elobey, Annob n, and Corisco, written late in Styron s life, a soldier attempts to exorcise the dread of an approaching battle by daydreaming about far off islands, visited vicariously through his childhood stamp collection.

Perhaps the last volume from one of literature s greatest voices, The Suicide Run brings to life the drama, inhumanity, absurdity, and heroism that forever changed the men who served in the Marine Corps.

Conversations with William Styron

This is a selection of interviews with William Styron published during the period 1951 1984, from the months just following publication of Lie Down in Darkness, his first novel, to the period after publication of Sophie’s Choice. Some twenty five interviews are reprinted here, including six that are translated from the French and published in this country for the first time. Styron is one of the most frequently interviewed writers of his generation. Unlike Faulkner, to whom he was often compared early in his career, Styron has learned to be a patient and cooperative interview subject. His comments in these interviews reveal much about the sources of his fiction and about his early life. He also reacts to attacks on his work, comments on his mission as a writer, and describes his compositional habits. This is a useful collection for those who wish to know Styron better and to be guided by his conversations to clearer insights into his writing. For scholars and for general readers alike it will have much appeal. It gives the reader a sense of being in Styron’s presence, of enjoying his flashes of wit and intellect, and of realizing how remarkable his achievement has been and how universally he is admired.

Darkness Visible

A work of great personal courage and a literary tour de force, this bestseller is Styron’s true account of his descent into a crippling and almost suicidal depression. Styron is perhaps the first writer to convey the full terror of depression’s psychic landscape, as well as the illuminating path to recovery. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Fathers and Daughters

A large book of photographs and background information on fathers and their daughters from the well known and famous to the regular guy and his regular daughter.

Havanas In Camelot

After the great success in 1990 of Darkness Visible, his memoir of depression and recovery, William Styron wrote more frequently in an introspective, autobiographical mode. Havanas In Camelot brings together fourteen of his personal essays, including a reminiscence of his brief friendship with John F. Kennedy; a recollection of the power and ceremony on display at the inauguration of Fran ois Mitterrand; memoirs of Truman Capote, James Baldwin, and Terry Southern; a meditation on Mark Twain; an account of Styron’s daily walks with his dog; and an evocation of his summer home on Martha s Vineyard.

Styron s essays touch on the great themes of his fiction racial oppression, slavery, and the Holocaust but for the most part they address other subjects: bowdlerizations of history, literary lists, childhood moviegoing, the censoring of his own work, and the pursuit of celebrity fetish objects.

These essays, which reveal a reflective and humorous side of Styron s nature, make possible a fuller as*sessment of this enigmatic man of American letters.

Letters to My Father

‘I’ve finally pretty much decided what to write next a novel based on Nat Turner’s rebellion,’ twenty six year old William Styron confided to his father in a letter he wrote on May 1, 1952. Styron would not publish his Pulitzer Prize winning The Confessions of Nat Turner until 1967, but this letter undercuts those critics who later attacked the writer as an opportunist capitalizing on the heated racial climate of the late 1960s. From 1943 to 1953, Styron wrote over one hundred letters to William C. Styron, Sr., detailing his adventures, his works in progress, and his ruminations on the craft of writing. In Letters to My Father, Styron biographer James L. W. West III collects this correspondence for the first time, revealing the early, intimate thoughts of a young man who was to become a literary icon. Styron wrote his earliest letters from Davidson College, where he was very much unsure of himself and of his prospects in life. By the last few letters, however, he had achieved a great deal: he had earned a commission in the Marine Corps, survived World War II, published the novel Lie Down in Darkness 1951 and the novella The Long March 1953, and won the Prix de Rome. He had also recently married and was about to return to the United States from an expatriate period in Paris and Rome. The letters constitute a portrait of the artist as a young man. They read like an epistolary novel, with movement from location to location and changes in voice and language. Styron was extremely close to his father and quite open with him. His story is a classic one, from youthful insecurity to artistic self discovery, capped by recognition and success. There are challenges along the way for the hero poor academic performance, a syphilis scare, writer’s block, temporary frustration in romance. But Styron overcomes these difficulties and emerges as a confident young writer, ready to tackle his next project, the novel Set This House on Fire 1960. Rose Styron, the author’s widow, contributes a prefatory memoir of the senior Styron. West has provided comprehensive annotations to the correspondence, and the volume also has several illustrations, including facsimiles of some of the letters, which survive among Styron’s papers at Duke University. Finally, there is a selection of Styron’s apprentice fiction from the late 1940s and early 1950s. In all of American literature, no other extended series of such letters son to father exists. Letters to My Father offers a unique glimpse into the formative years of one of the most admired and controversial writers of his time.