Where to Start with William Styron: A Reading Guide

William Styron (1925–2006) was the American novelist whose ambitious, morally serious fiction engaged with the gravest subjects of the twentieth century — slavery, the Holocaust, depression, the Southern past and its legacy — in prose of extraordinary rhetorical power. He was among the most celebrated American novelists of the 1950s and 1960s: Lie Down in Darkness (1951), his first novel, published when he was twenty-six, established him as a writer of exceptional gifts; The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) won the Pulitzer Prize and generated one of the most significant literary controversies of its era; and Sophie’s Choice (1979) became an international bestseller and an enduring novel about survival, guilt, and the impossibility of recovering from what history has done to its victims.

Where to Start: Sophie’s Choice (1979)

The essential Styron — and the novel that made him famous beyond American literary circles. Stingo, a young Southerner who has come to Brooklyn to write his first novel, meets Sophie and Nathan in the boarding house where he lives. Sophie is a Polish Catholic survivor of Auschwitz; Nathan is the brilliant, erratic Jewish-American lover who alternately adores and destroys her. As Stingo falls in love with Sophie and witnesses Nathan’s increasingly violent behaviour, Sophie gradually reveals the truth of what happened to her in the camps.

The novel is Styron’s most capacious — it encompasses Stingo’s comic coming-of-age, a meditation on the relationship between the American South and European fascism (both built on the subjugation of a class of people), and a descent into the worst that the twentieth century produced. The title’s choice — forced on Sophie by an SS officer who makes her decide which of her two children will die — is one of the most powerful moments in postwar American fiction.

The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967)

Styron’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — narrated by Nat Turner, the slave preacher who led the bloodiest slave rebellion in American history in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831. Turner awaits execution in his jail cell, remembering his life: his relatively privileged upbringing as a trusted domestic slave, his growing religious conviction that he had been chosen by God, and the rebellion that killed sixty people before being suppressed.

The novel was celebrated on publication as a major act of moral imagination — a white Southern writer entering the mind of a Black revolutionary — and denounced by a group of Black intellectuals who published William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond, arguing that Styron had distorted the historical Turner. The controversy did not diminish the novel’s power; it remains one of the most ambitious and most debated novels in American literature.

Darkness Visible (1990)

Styron’s shortest and, for many readers, most necessary work — a memoir of the severe clinical depression that overtook him in his early sixties and brought him to the point of suicide. His account of the illness — its onset, its symptoms (terror, helplessness, the sense of the self dissolving), and his eventual hospitalisation and recovery — is one of the most honest and most useful books about mental illness in English.

Styron argues throughout that the word ‘depression’ is misleading — it implies a manageable sadness, rather than the prostrating, terrifying condition that he and millions of others have suffered. The memoir helped destigmatise depression at a moment when public discussion of mental illness was still limited; it remains essential for anyone trying to understand the condition.

Lie Down in Darkness (1951)

Styron’s first novel — published when he was twenty-six and immediately recognised as the work of an exceptional talent. The novel follows the Loftis family as they accompany the coffin of Peyton Loftis, who has killed herself in New York, on a train journey to burial in their Virginia hometown. Through the day-long journey and the recollections of those present, the novel reconstructs Peyton’s life and the failures of love, understanding, and sanity that brought her to her death.

The most lyrical of Styron’s novels and the one most influenced by Faulkner; a remarkable achievement for a twenty-six-year-old writer.

Reading William Styron

Styron’s fiction is distinguished by its moral ambition — its willingness to engage directly with history’s greatest horrors and to ask what they did to the people who lived through them — and by the rhetorical power of his prose, which is grander and more overtly beautiful than most of his contemporaries. He has been criticized for the historical controversies surrounding Nat Turner and for a certain Southern gothicism that some find excessive; he is celebrated for a seriousness of purpose that took the darkest subjects at their full weight. Begin with Sophie’s Choice for the most complete and the most devastating; read Darkness Visible for the most personally illuminating and the most directly useful.