This Day in Literary History (William Styron, Chronicler of Slavery, Holocaust, and Despair, Born)

June 11, 1925— Novelist and essayist William Styron, who wrote powerful fiction about slavery, the military, and the Holocaust—as well as a searing memoir of his own struggle with suicidal depression—was born in Newport News, Va.

Lie Down in Darkness brought the 26-year-old Styron notice as a novelist of abundant narrative gifts and deep moral seriousness, working in Faulkner’s tradition of Southern storytelling. He did not realize until his first bout of mental illness in the mid-1980s that even the heroine of this early effort suffered from this affliction.

As part of a cohort of writers who served in World War II and briefly spent time abroad after its conclusion, he—as well as friends James Jones, Irwin Shaw, Norman Mailer, and Peter Matthiessen—took cues from the “Lost Generation.”

They were, Styron’s youngest daughter Alexandra wrote in her memoir Reading My Father, “Big Male Writers…[who] perpetuated, without apology, the cliché of the gifted, hard drinking, bellicose writer that gave so much of twentieth-century literature a muscular, glamorous aura."

Even as Styron played the bon vivant during summer parties at Martha’s Vineyard, his poet-activist wife Rose and their four children endured his moodiness, angry outbursts, and frequent frustration over his inability to bring his work to as quick and successful conclusion.

In middle age, that age of homage, masking their own attempts to obliterate the shock of their war, proved increasingly unsuccessful and counterproductive. Though Styron’s career lasted four decades, his output was not that extensive—four full-length novels, a book of short stories, a memoir, a play, and an essay collection—finding, at the age of 65, that the “senior partner” to his writing, his drinking, no longer satisfied or spurred his writing.

A childhood in Tidewater region of Virginia was overshadowed by his mother’s decline and death from breast cancer, a struggle that only worsened his father’s melancholy. W.C. Styron’s second marriage left his son with a stepmother he found chilly and unsympathetic.

I briefly described in this post from 14 years ago the controversy surrounding Styron’s Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the bloodiest slave uprising in antebellum America, The Confessions of Nat Turner.

Many admirers like myself of his forays into the darkest chapters of American life attributed the long gaps between books to perfectionism, a tendency common among authors.

But with Darkness Visible, he described, in shattering detail, how his writer’s block was bound up with a psychic condition that he likened to a storm in his brain.

This memoir provided knowledge and help to others similarly afflicted. But, aside from the trio of novellas collected in Tidewater Morning (1993), Styron was never able to complete his World War II novel, The Way of the Warrior, after Sophie’s Choice in 1979, because his depression returned with a vengeance in the spring of 2000, troubling him till his death six years later.