Stewart
Active Member
William Styron dies (aged 81) (Source: Guardian Unlimited)
The Pulitzer prize-winning novelist William Styron, author of The Confessions of Nat Turner and Sophie's Choice, has died. He was 81.
Styron's daughter, Alexandra, said the author died of pneumonia at Martha's Vineyard Hospital in Massachusetts, on Wednesday. Styron, who had homes in Martha's Vineyard and Connecticut, has been in failing health for a long time.
Styron was a Virginia native, whose fascinations with race, class and personal guilt led to such tormented narratives as Lie Down in Darkness and The Confessions of Nat Turner, which won the Pulitzer Prize despite protests that the book was racist and inaccurate.
Among his other works were Sophie's Choice, his award-winning novel about a Holocaust survivor from Poland, which was later turned into an acclaimed film starring an Oscar-winning Meryl Streep, and A Tidewater Morning, a collection of fiction pieces. He also published a book of essays, This Quiet Dust, and a bestselling memoir, Darkness Visible, in which he recalled nearly taking his own life.
A lifelong liberal, Styron was involved in many public causes, from supporting a Connecticut teacher suspended for refusing to say the oath of allegiance, to advocating human rights for Jews in the Soviet Union. 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.
Styron found writing an increasing struggle in his latter years. He was reportedly working on a military novel, yet published no full-length work of fiction after Sophie's Choice, which came out in 1979. He remained well-connected, however, socialising with President Clinton in Martha's Vineyard, and joining Arthur Miller and Gabriel Garcia Marquez on a delegation that met with Cuban leader Fidel Castro in 2000.
The son of a shipbuilder, Styron was born in Newport News, Virginia, to a family whose history extended to colonial Virginia. He was awed by the fiction of fellow southerner Thomas Wolfe, and knew by his late teens that he wanted to be a writer. His own life offered strong material. At age 13, his mother died, transforming him into a "hell-raiser" with an unhealable wound of guilt. He served as a lieutenant in the US marines during the second world war and was stationed in Okinawa in 1945.
"Some of my problems I think came from a continuing anguish over my mother's death. If I had gotten shot it would have been, I suppose, some kind of completion. It's hard to say how that would have worked out," Styron told the Associated Press in a 1990 interview. "When I was a young marine platoon leader, there was this incredible sense of fate. The myth at that age is you're going to live forever. Well, I never believed that and my friends didn't. I thought I was going to die."
The Pulitzer prize-winning novelist William Styron, author of The Confessions of Nat Turner and Sophie's Choice, has died. He was 81.
Styron's daughter, Alexandra, said the author died of pneumonia at Martha's Vineyard Hospital in Massachusetts, on Wednesday. Styron, who had homes in Martha's Vineyard and Connecticut, has been in failing health for a long time.
Styron was a Virginia native, whose fascinations with race, class and personal guilt led to such tormented narratives as Lie Down in Darkness and The Confessions of Nat Turner, which won the Pulitzer Prize despite protests that the book was racist and inaccurate.
Among his other works were Sophie's Choice, his award-winning novel about a Holocaust survivor from Poland, which was later turned into an acclaimed film starring an Oscar-winning Meryl Streep, and A Tidewater Morning, a collection of fiction pieces. He also published a book of essays, This Quiet Dust, and a bestselling memoir, Darkness Visible, in which he recalled nearly taking his own life.
A lifelong liberal, Styron was involved in many public causes, from supporting a Connecticut teacher suspended for refusing to say the oath of allegiance, to advocating human rights for Jews in the Soviet Union. 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.
Styron found writing an increasing struggle in his latter years. He was reportedly working on a military novel, yet published no full-length work of fiction after Sophie's Choice, which came out in 1979. He remained well-connected, however, socialising with President Clinton in Martha's Vineyard, and joining Arthur Miller and Gabriel Garcia Marquez on a delegation that met with Cuban leader Fidel Castro in 2000.
The son of a shipbuilder, Styron was born in Newport News, Virginia, to a family whose history extended to colonial Virginia. He was awed by the fiction of fellow southerner Thomas Wolfe, and knew by his late teens that he wanted to be a writer. His own life offered strong material. At age 13, his mother died, transforming him into a "hell-raiser" with an unhealable wound of guilt. He served as a lieutenant in the US marines during the second world war and was stationed in Okinawa in 1945.
"Some of my problems I think came from a continuing anguish over my mother's death. If I had gotten shot it would have been, I suppose, some kind of completion. It's hard to say how that would have worked out," Styron told the Associated Press in a 1990 interview. "When I was a young marine platoon leader, there was this incredible sense of fate. The myth at that age is you're going to live forever. Well, I never believed that and my friends didn't. I thought I was going to die."
