ARTICLES. “She would have wound up jumping from a window no matter where she came from.”. In August, some of the angrier criticisms were published in “William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond,” a book edited by the African history scholar John Henrik Clarke. He served as a lieutenant in the US marines during the second world war and was stationed in Okinawa in 1945. William Styron is a renowned American author who, at sixty years of age, is afflicted by clinical depression. Styron found writing an increasing struggle in his latter years. His life seemed to expand outside the door of his workroom as well. Claude William Styron, 91, of Charlotte, NC passed away Sunday, October 7 at Carolinas Medical Center-Mercy. In 1966 he bought a house on harborfront property on Martha’s Vineyard, where the family regularly vacationed and where he began to live from May through October. All of Accession 2008-0072 and parts of Accession 2008-0294 remain on deposit. Exclusive & Unlimited access to Esquire Classic - The Official Esquire Archive. His own life offered strong material. For Mr. Styron, success came early. The pain is unrelenting, and … He was awed by the fiction of fellow southerner Thomas Wolfe, and knew by his late teens that he wanted to be a writer. William Styron (1925 – 2006) William Clark Styron, Jr. (June 11, 1925-November 1, 2006) was an eminent American novelist and essayist. In the summer of 1985, when he turned 60, he suddenly found that alcohol no longer agreed with him. Accession 2017-0068 is a gift of Linda McGrew. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. The other was that even though non-Jews had also been victims of the death camps, for Mr. Styron to write about one of them, a Polish Catholic, was to diminish the true horror of the event, whose primary purpose, these critics pointed out, was the destruction of European Jewry. He recovered and wrote a harrowing account of his experience, which began as a lecture and became the best-selling book “Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness” (1990). In the 90s, he was one of a group of authors and historians who successfully opposed plans for a Disney theme park near the Manassas National Battlefield in northern Virginia. After a year in Italy, in 1954 he moved to Roxbury, Conn., and set about completing his second novel, “Set This House on Fire.” A technical advance over “Lie Down in Darkness,” this novel was richer in its storytelling and, full of the latest in Continental existentialism, distinctly not Southern. “I think for years to come his work will be seen for its unique power,” Mr. Mailer said of Mr. Styron in a telephone interview a few years ago. “I just found intellectual life here more congenial,” he told an interviewer years later. And once again, a Styron project aroused controversy. Then up to the workroom to write for four hours, perfecting each paragraph until 200 or 300 words are completed; have cocktails and dinner with the family and friends at 8 or 9; and stay up until 2 or 3 in the morning, drinking and reading and smoking and listening to music. The son of a shipbuilder, Styron was born in Newport News, Virginia, to a family whose history extended to colonial Virginia. He moves to a Brooklyn boarding house where he sets about writing what he hopes will be the next great American novel. In “Darkness Visible,” he concluded, referring to Dante: “For those who have dwelt in depression’s dark wood, and known its inexplicable agony, their return from the abyss is not unlike the ascent of the poet, trudging upward and upward out of hell’s black depths and at last emerging into what he saw as ‘the shining world.’ There, whoever has been restored to health has almost always been restored to the capacity for serenity and joy, and this may be indemnity enough for having endured the despair beyond despair.”. But still it remained a somewhat melodramatic portrait of a group of Americans in Italy, and while it was admired in France, it got largely negative reviews in the United States. The timing of the book was superb, appearing in 1967 on the crest of the civil rights movement. Reviewers were sympathetic to Mr. Styron’s right to inhabit his subject’s mind, to speak in a version of Nat Turner’s voice and to weave a fiction around the few facts known about the uprising. Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay. But giving it up brought on mood disorders for which he had to be medicated. To the criticism that the Holocaust was beyond art, he told an interviewer that however evil the Nazis were, they were neither demons nor extraterrestrials but ordinary men who committed monumental acts of barbarism. A majority of reviewers praised the novel for its power and melodiousness — although a few complained of its morbidity and its characters’ lack of moral stature — and the book established Mr. Styron as a writer to be watched. Styron had a curious special article in Newsweek magazine on April 18, 1994, that caught my eye.