Styron: A Life

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Thus spoke novelist William Styron, who died today. See NYT obit, William Styron, Novelist, Dies at 81. As the times said:

William Styron, the novelist from the American South whose explorations of difficult historical and moral questions earned him a place among the leading literary figures of the post-World War II generation, died yesterday on Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., where he had a home. He was 81.

As I've mentioned before, I was an English major, so reading was my life. Despite the fact that I am not from the South, and did I ever spend much time there, I always enjoyed Southern literature. Styron, best know for "Sophie's Choice," was a favorite author in the modern Southern style -- although he did not consider himself a southern writer. The Times also notes that his work was somewhat controversial, because he wrote outside his own realm:

Mr. Styron’s early work, including “Lie Down in Darkness,” won him wide recognition as a distinctive voice of the South and an heir to William Faulkner. In subsequent fiction, like “The Confessions of Nat Turner” and “Sophie’s Choice,” he transcended his own immediate world and moved across historical and cultural lines.

Critics and readers alike ranked him among the best of the generation that succeeded Hemingway and Faulkner.

Audio interviews of Styron with Don Swaim from the early 1980s are also available at Wired for Books.

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A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You should live several lives while reading it.
-William Styron

Tags: Literature, William Styron, Quote of the Day