STYRON, WILLIAM

born June 11, 1925, Newport News, Va., U.S. American novelist noted for his treatment of tragic themes and his use of a rich, classical prose style. Styron served in the U.S. Marine Corps before graduating from Duke University, Durham, N.C., in 1947. During the 1950s he was part of the community of American expatriates in Paris. From 1953 he served as advisory editor to the Paris Review. Styron's first novel, Lie Down in Darkness (1951), set in his native tidewater Virginia, tells of a young woman from a loveless middle-class family who fights unsuccessfully for her sanity before committing suicide. His next work, The Long March (1956), chronicles a brutal forced march undertaken by recruits in a Marine training camp. The novel Set This House on Fire appeared in 1960. Styron's fourth novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), is an account of a historical incident, a black slave rebellion led by the title character in Virginia in 1831. Based on a transcript of Turner's testimony and told from his point of view, the book portrays a sensitive, intelligent, and kindly man who is denied all normal human happiness because of his degrading enslavement. Embittered and alienated, he undertakes a bloody revolt that ends in his capture and execution. The novel is a tour de force of complex psychological presentation and a vivid evocation of slavery in the United States in the early 19th century. It was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1968. Styron's later works include a play, In the Clap Shack (1972), and the novel Sophie's Choice (1979; filmed 1982), portraying the growth of a friendship between a young Southern writer and a Polish woman who survived the Nazi death camp Auschwitz. This Quiet Dust (1982) is a collection of essays that treat the dominant themes of Styron's fiction. Darkness Visible (1990) is a nonfiction account of Styron's struggle against depression.