The Confessions of Nat Turner

The Most Controversial American Novel of the 1960s

William Styron published The Confessions of Nat Turner in 1967, and it won the Pulitzer Prize the following year and sold enormous numbers and generated a controversy that has not been resolved in the six decades since. In 1968, ten Black writers published William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond — a collection of essays attacking the novel on grounds ranging from historical inaccuracy to cultural appropriation to psychological distortion. The attack was organized, serious, and by any measure effective: the terms on which the novel has been discussed ever since are largely set by its critics rather than its defenders.

The novel inhabits the first-person voice of Nat Turner — the Virginia slave preacher who led the most significant slave rebellion in American history in August 1831, killing approximately sixty white men, women, and children before the rebellion was suppressed and Turner was captured, tried, and hanged. Styron based the narrative on the actual “Confessions” that Turner dictated to a white lawyer before his execution, but expanded it enormously, giving Turner an interior life, a theological development, a sexual psychology, and a relationship to slavery’s specific violence that the historical record does not support in detail.

The Formal Achievement

The formal achievement is not in question: Styron sustains a first-person historical narrative of 448 pages with remarkable consistency and density. His Turner is a man shaped by specific conditions — a literate slave whose literacy was permitted by relatively (by the standards of the time and place) humane owners, whose reading of the Old Testament produced a theology of violent liberation, and whose charisma drew followers who trusted his reading of the divine mandate. Styron renders the specific psychology of this formation — the way slavery distorts every relationship, every thought, every aspiration — with the research and imagination of a writer who has engaged seriously with the historical record.

The controversy about whether Styron had the authority to inhabit Turner’s consciousness is a genuine one, and it is not resolved by appeals to the universality of the imagination. What the ten Black writers argued was specific: that Styron’s Turner reflects the preoccupations of a mid-century white Southerner (Turner’s fantasies about a white woman, his psychological dependence on relatively benevolent white owners) rather than the historical Turner, and that the novel thereby domesticates a radical Black revolutionary into a figure more legible and less threatening to white readers.

A Document of Its Moment

The novel is now read not only as fiction but as a document of the late 1960s — a moment when American cultural politics around race were being transformed and the question of who has the authority to tell whose story was being asked with new urgency. The controversy around The Confessions of Nat Turner was among the first major public arguments about that question in American literary culture, and many of the terms deployed today in debates about representation and appropriation were forged in that argument.

That the novel is also, in its own terms, a work of extraordinary formal achievement — serious, dense, morally engaged — is the fact that makes the controversy worth having. Styron did not write a careless exploitation of a historical figure; he wrote a careful, ambitious, and consequential novel that turned out to raise questions his imagination could not fully answer.

Our rating: 4.2/5 — One of American fiction’s great formal achievements and great controversies — a novel that demands engagement on its own terms and on the political terms the response literature established.