Styron, William

Born June 11, 1925, in Newport News, VA; died of pneumonia, November 1, 2006, in Martha’s Vineyard, MA. Author. Though William Styron won acclaim for his 1951 literary debut and several other works, including the 1979 novel Sophie’s Choice, in his later years he was best known for chronicling his own experience with clinical depression with characteristic literary polish in Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness. In it he recounted the depths of desolation and gloom he occasionally experienced, but concluded that “whoever has been restored to health has almost always been restored to the capacity for serenity and joy, and this may be indemnity enough for having endured the despair beyond despair,” he asserted in it, according to his New York Times obituary by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt.

Styron was born in 1925 in Newport News, Virginia, a city whose shipbuilding industry employed his engineer-father. Styron’s mother was a Pennsylvania native who died when he was 13—a tragedy that shaped his life and writing—but his father hailed from an old Southern family and Styron’s grandmother had even owned two slaves as a child. After completing his high school education at a private academy in Christchurch, Virginia, Styron enrolled in the Marine Corps’ officers training school in the midst of World War II, studying at Duke Uni- versity and being sent to war only in its final days as the United States planned for an invasion of Japan that never happened. After his return, he completed his degree at Duke in 1947 and moved to New York City, where he briefly held a job as a copy editor at a publishing house before being uncer-emoniously fired for reasons that included, he later said, his slovenly attire and a penchant for reading the New York Post at his desk.

With financial support from his father, Styron finished his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness, which earned a raft of critical accolades when it was published in 1951. Its story recounts the unhappy life of a young woman, Peyton Loftis, her dysfunctional Southern family, and the series of events that bring on her suicide. Styron was immediately hailed as the new literary voice of the South and the successor to novelist William Faulkner. It also earned international acclaim and led to his being awarded the Prix de Rome, a prestigious literary honor. With the award came a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, which he took up once he finished a second stint in the Marines during the Korean War. Following that he moved to Paris and wrote his second work, The Long March, while joining with other American literary talents living in the city to found the Paris Review.

Styron married a poet he began dating while in Rome, the American Rose Burgunder, and the pair eventually returned to the United States, settled in Connecticut, and began a family. Set This House on Fire, his next novel, followed the travails of a set of American expatriates in Italy, but critics panned it as ponderous and bleak when it appeared in 1960. It took several more years to write a follow-up—not atypical for Styron, who spent about four hours a day at his desk—but The Confessions of Nat Turner returned him to literary fame when it was published in 1967. Its story was a fictionalized account of a real-life event, the 1831 slave revolt that took place near Styron’s childhood home, and even won him the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1968, but then became the target of criticism from by prominent scholars as inauthentic and an unfair appropriation of a seminal event in African-American history.

Styron stood by his work despite the critics, an un-apologetic commitment to creative license that he continued when some faulted his next work, the 1979 novel Sophie’s Choice. Here he tackled the topic of a Polish woman struggling with her experiences as a Roman Catholic who survived a Nazi concentration camp during World War II, but at great psychic cost. It won the American Book Award for 1980 and was made into a Hollywood movie two years later that won Meryl Streep an Academy Award for the title role.

A father of four, Styron lived in Roxbury, Connecticut, and took his family to a summer home on Martha’s Vineyard every year, where he became one of the Massachusetts’s community’s many literary celebrities. He was a social drinker for many years, but later admitted he overindulged as a way to stave off his darker moods. Once he stopped drinking altogether in the mid1980s, his brain chemistry was thrown off-balance, and he was diagnosed as clinically depressed. He was hospitalized for a time, but recovered and became an advocate for mental-health treatment on both the lecture circuit and in his bestselling 1990 memoir Darkness Visible.

Styron died at the age of 81 on Martha’s Vineyard, ostensibly from a bout with pneumonia, on November 1, 2006, but friends and family noted his health had been in decline for some time before that. Survivors include his wife, Rose; his son, Thomas; his daughters Alexandra, Susanna, and Paola; and eight grandchildren. Though he was not as prolific a writer as some of his contemporaries, he left behind a body of work that was unparalleled in its near-perfection as literary legacies. “No other American writer of my generation,” fellow Pulitzer recipient Norman Mailer told Lehmann-Haupt in the New York Times, “has had so omnipresent and exquisite a sense of the elegiac.” Sources: Chicago Tribune, November 2, 2006, sec. 3, p. 7; CNN.com, http://www.cnn.com/2006/SHOWBIZ/books/11/01/styron.obit.ap/index.html (November 2, 2006); Entertainment Weekly, November 17, 2006, p. 18; Los Angeles Times, November 2, 2006, p. A1, p. A17; New York Times, November 2, 2006, p. C17; People, November 20, 2006, p. 53; Times (London), November 3, 2006, p. 78.

—Carol Brennan