I have some terribly sad news. William Styron, one of my favorite writers, died yesterday from pneumonia in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. Styron is best known for his lyrical and tragic novel about a holocaust survivor, Sophie's Choice, a bestseller that was made into a movie with the same name, and for The Confessions of Nat Turner, the story of a black slave revolt that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1968. The last book that Styron completed, Darkness Visible (1990), was a short memoir of his descent into a deep depression that caused him to drink heavily and nearly ended with his suicide. According to some sources, Styron was working on a military novel at the time of his death. Unfortunately, he had not published any full-length work of fiction after Sophie's Choice, which was published in 1979.
Styron was a Virginia native. He wrote about race, class and personal guilt. Styron is survived by his wife, Rose, who is a poet; four children, Alexandra, Susanna, Paola and Thomas; and eight grandchildren. Styron was 81.
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I also value the work of W. Styron from 'Nat Turner' to Sophie's Choice'. His storytelling was moving beyond description. You could almost smell the post war Brooklyn in ' Sophie. You know the wooing writer in the same novel was the author, telling the tragedy first hand.
I was not surprised by his self outing' and is description of depressive illness in a later work. His empathy for troubled characters was apparent, help by his personal struggle with 'the dark times'.