He said in a 1962 letter to a new literary agent: "You get these queer cultural anomalies. His books were translated into more than 15 languages. Styron settled in Connecticut and Martha's Vineyard, but traveled widely. He also published "The Long March," based on his stint in the Marines. He married in 1953, the same year that he helped Peter Matthiessen and George Plimpton set up a well-regarded but little-read literary quarterly, the Paris Review. He became friends with the literary lions of the era, including James Baldwin, Irwin Shaw, James Jones and Norman Mailer, with whom he later had a long feud. The prize required him to spend a year in Rome, and he began that sojourn six months early, touring London and Paris. His first novel, "Lie Down in Darkness," was published to acclaim, capturing the Prix de Rome from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a society that later named him one of its 4,000 members. The cataracts that he hid in order to enlist in the Marines helped him leave the service almost a decade later. The Marines recalled him during the Korean War, and he edited the proofs of his first book during training camp. He worked briefly at the McGraw-Hill publishing house in Manhattan, then struck out on his own to write his first novel. He finished at Duke in 1947 with a degree in English. The war ended before he went overseas, but before he was mustered out he spent a month as commander of guards at a naval prison near New York City. Sent to Parris Island, S.C., for basic training, he landed in the venereal diseases ward of the base infirmary with a misdiagnosed case of trench mouth. He was sent to Duke University, where he was enrolled in the V-12 program, which was designed to hold Navy and Marine officer candidates while they studied subjects expected to be useful once they were deployed. He enrolled at Davidson College in 1942 but spent only a year there, enlisting in the Marines by memorizing the eye chart to hide his poor vision. His mother, who discovered she had breast cancer two years after his birth, died when he was 13, the same year he began writing short stories. Styron learned to read before he entered first grade. His mother's family settled in Pennsylvania about the same time as the Styrons moved ashore.īorn in Newport News, Mr. Styron said, in his most widely quoted remark.īoth sides of his family had deep roots in the New World: His father's Scandinavian family moved from Barbados to North Carolina's Outer Banks to Virginia's Tidewater area almost 300 years ago. You should live several lives while reading it," Mr. "A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. Styron's work habits were regular - he wrote slowly, in pencil, longhand, on yellow legal pads, with few revisions - and his work broke ground in American literature. He took seriously the advice of novelist Gustave Flaubert: "Be regular and ordinary in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work." Mr. Styron's work is characterized by elegant language, characters who grapple with morality and a strong narrative. His 1990 memoir of depression, "Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness," made him a hero to advocates of destigmatizing mental illness and earned him a National Magazine Award.įrom the publication of his first novel, "Lie Down in Darkness" (1951), he was considered to be the logical literary successor to fellow Southerner William Faulkner. Styron did not understand the experience of slaves. His 1967 novel, "The Confessions of Nat Turner," about the leader of a real slave rebellion, sparked controversy among African American critics who said Mr. His 1979 novel about the horrific decision forced on a character during the Nazi reign in Poland, "Sophie's Choice," was named one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century by the Modern Library editorial board. He partied with presidents and publishers, signed petitions on political issues and testified in court that he saw Chicago police beat demonstrators during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Styron, 81, won most of the major literary awards of the 20th century, including the Pulitzer Prize for "The Confessions of Nat Turner," the National Book Award for "Sophie's Choice" and the National Medal of the Arts for his lifetime body of work. William Styron, the Virginia-born author whose novels plunged readers into the dark edges of historical moments, died of pneumonia Nov.
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