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William Styron, A Life
On the door to William Styron's writing studio is a quotation from "Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work." Styron has lived by that injunction, addressing major subjects--slavery, the Holocaust, mental illness--with a power that has gripped readers around the world.
Though reared in the South, Styron spent most of his adult working life in the North. His first book, Lie Down in Darkness, was a brilliant debut, which inspired him to go abroad for the first time. In Paris, he fell in with other young American writers and helped found The Paris Review along with George Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen. Styron spent a year in Rome, married, and returned to the States.
After writing Set This House on Fire, an ambitious novel set in Italy, he began working on The Confessions of Nat Turner, the moving story of a slave rebellion in Virginia. James Baldwin, who lived in a small house on Styron's property in Connecticut during this period, became a sounding board, as well as an inspiration, for the novel. It was also about this time that Styron began lifelong associations with Philip Roth, Arthur Miller, Carlos Fuentes, Willie Morris, and, in particular, James Jones. Readers will be fascinated by the full story of Styron's feud with Norman Mailer, an estrangement so severe that each refused to speak to the other for almost twenty-five years.
Styron's political life has been active, from his presence at the riot-torn l968 Democratic national convention in Chicago to his controversial long-term opposition to the death penalty.
The Confessions of Nat Turner made Styron famous, but it also brought him under attack. At one point, the explosive reaction to the novel led Styron to imagine that his wife, Rose, had been abducted.
In Sophie's Choice, Styron turned to another charged subject--the Holocaust--and Auschwitz became the focus of his life for several years. The result was a novel that added a major tragic figure, Sophie Zawistowska, to the enduring literature of our time.
In the aftermath of a mental breakdown, Styron produced the unflinchingly candid Darkness Visible, a book that dramatically altered the nation's negative perception of clinical depression.
James West has studied William Styron's life and career for over twenty years. He has had complete access not only to Styron's papers, letters, and manuscripts, but also to his friends, and has produced an outstanding portrait of one of the most controversial and admired authors of his generation.
Though reared in the South, Styron spent most of his adult working life in the North. His first book, Lie Down in Darkness, was a brilliant debut, which inspired him to go abroad for the first time. In Paris, he fell in with other young American writers and helped found The Paris Review along with George Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen. Styron spent a year in Rome, married, and returned to the States.
After writing Set This House on Fire, an ambitious novel set in Italy, he began working on The Confessions of Nat Turner, the moving story of a slave rebellion in Virginia. James Baldwin, who lived in a small house on Styron's property in Connecticut during this period, became a sounding board, as well as an inspiration, for the novel. It was also about this time that Styron began lifelong associations with Philip Roth, Arthur Miller, Carlos Fuentes, Willie Morris, and, in particular, James Jones. Readers will be fascinated by the full story of Styron's feud with Norman Mailer, an estrangement so severe that each refused to speak to the other for almost twenty-five years.
Styron's political life has been active, from his presence at the riot-torn l968 Democratic national convention in Chicago to his controversial long-term opposition to the death penalty.
The Confessions of Nat Turner made Styron famous, but it also brought him under attack. At one point, the explosive reaction to the novel led Styron to imagine that his wife, Rose, had been abducted.
In Sophie's Choice, Styron turned to another charged subject--the Holocaust--and Auschwitz became the focus of his life for several years. The result was a novel that added a major tragic figure, Sophie Zawistowska, to the enduring literature of our time.
In the aftermath of a mental breakdown, Styron produced the unflinchingly candid Darkness Visible, a book that dramatically altered the nation's negative perception of clinical depression.
James West has studied William Styron's life and career for over twenty years. He has had complete access not only to Styron's papers, letters, and manuscripts, but also to his friends, and has produced an outstanding portrait of one of the most controversial and admired authors of his generation.
506 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1998
21 people are currently reading
95 people want to read
About the author
James L.W. West III
65 books9 followersJames L. W. West III, a native of Virginia, is Sparks Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. West is a book historian, scholarly editor, and biographer. He has written books on F. Scott Fitzgerald and on the history of professional authorship in America and has held fellowships from the J. S. Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. West has had Fulbright appointments in England (at Cambridge University) and in Belgium (at the Université de Liège). He is the general editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald and is at work on a volume of essays.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
March 4, 2013
I've read three Styron novels this year, and find the man himself quite interesting (I actually wrote to him in the mid-90s, and was allowed to send him some books to be signed). While rummaging around in some boxes of books I came upon this biography, which I'd quite forgotten I had - it came out in 1998 and is fresh, unread hardcover copy - I have NO idea where, when or how I obtained it!
3/04: Covers Styron's life and writing up to 1998, as well as friendships with James Jones, James Baldwin, and others - oddly enough, there isn't very much about his friendship with Lillian Hellman, despite her being one of the dedicatees of CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER (nor, I think, is one of the other dedicatees ever mentioned at all).
Highly recommended for the backstories of Styron's novels.
3/04: Covers Styron's life and writing up to 1998, as well as friendships with James Jones, James Baldwin, and others - oddly enough, there isn't very much about his friendship with Lillian Hellman, despite her being one of the dedicatees of CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER (nor, I think, is one of the other dedicatees ever mentioned at all).
Highly recommended for the backstories of Styron's novels.
April 18, 2021
Written well enough, but again, as with other biographies, the last years get rushed through. Perhaps also, since this was published in 1998, with William Styron alive, some things needed to be left out. It has a lot of information and is laid out all right. Some repetitiveness of names, dates, and information.
August 4, 2020
4.5 stars
I truly enjoyed gaining insight into the working life of one of my all-time favorite authors. West's biography is so comprehensively researched that I found myself wondering several times how on earth he was able to maintain an organized, yet interested approach to nearly each year of Styron's life until the book's publication in 1998.
One thing that may have been difficult in setting out on a project like this is the author's proximity to the subject. Styron was apparently not interested in adding personal, emotional insight into his written story at the time this was being compiled and published in the '90s, and West clearly respected Styron's wishes.
The result is a thorough and insightful -- and admittedly interesting -- biography of Styron's working life and evolution as a professional novelist, but sadly, we don't get much emotional dimension into Styron's inner life.
Still, West tells a very engaging story about Styron's early years and the backgrounds of his parents and grandparents.
My favorite part of the book was the beginning, which painted a lush picture of the aspects of Styron's early formative years -- the 1930's and Depression, his mother's death when he was only 14, and the culture and times of Tidewater Virginia in the years just before World War II.
This setting provides the backdrop for my favorite Styron book, "A Tidewater Morning," a collection of three stories based in his these years.
I re-read "Tidewater" more than 20 years after I read it for the first time in my AP junior English class and was pleasantly delighted to discover that I loved the collection just as much if not more the second time around.
I read "Tidewater," "Darkness Visible" and "The Suicide Run" as I read this biography and enjoyed gaining insight into the writing processes for each.
In doing so I think I found two minor errors on West's part with the timing of a couple aspects of "A Tidewater Morning" (the story) and "Darkness Visible." Both had to do with the timing of a couple key events in the narratives. One was that Styron's discovery that the drug Halcion likely caused his depression was discovered during his hospitalization, and not after. The other is the timing of an argument the protagonist's father had in "Tidewater" with a preacher occurred that before his wife's death. Both of these are extremely minor, but they did catch my eye.
I can see how they occurred. When a writer gets close to finishing a monster of a book like this one, it would be hourly work not to make your eyes glaze over when editing and re-checking facts in timelines. (The text of the book alone is 455 pages, btw, in the first edition; the notes and acknowledgements are another 30-something.)
Overall, I'd say this is not a swashbuckling adventure of a biography. It's unlikely to appeal to broad audience but it would enlighten and delight Styron fans -- especially those who love "A Tidewater Morning" and "Sophie's Choice."
I truly enjoyed gaining insight into the working life of one of my all-time favorite authors. West's biography is so comprehensively researched that I found myself wondering several times how on earth he was able to maintain an organized, yet interested approach to nearly each year of Styron's life until the book's publication in 1998.
One thing that may have been difficult in setting out on a project like this is the author's proximity to the subject. Styron was apparently not interested in adding personal, emotional insight into his written story at the time this was being compiled and published in the '90s, and West clearly respected Styron's wishes.
The result is a thorough and insightful -- and admittedly interesting -- biography of Styron's working life and evolution as a professional novelist, but sadly, we don't get much emotional dimension into Styron's inner life.
Still, West tells a very engaging story about Styron's early years and the backgrounds of his parents and grandparents.
My favorite part of the book was the beginning, which painted a lush picture of the aspects of Styron's early formative years -- the 1930's and Depression, his mother's death when he was only 14, and the culture and times of Tidewater Virginia in the years just before World War II.
This setting provides the backdrop for my favorite Styron book, "A Tidewater Morning," a collection of three stories based in his these years.
I re-read "Tidewater" more than 20 years after I read it for the first time in my AP junior English class and was pleasantly delighted to discover that I loved the collection just as much if not more the second time around.
I read "Tidewater," "Darkness Visible" and "The Suicide Run" as I read this biography and enjoyed gaining insight into the writing processes for each.
In doing so I think I found two minor errors on West's part with the timing of a couple aspects of "A Tidewater Morning" (the story) and "Darkness Visible." Both had to do with the timing of a couple key events in the narratives. One was that Styron's discovery that the drug Halcion likely caused his depression was discovered during his hospitalization, and not after. The other is the timing of an argument the protagonist's father had in "Tidewater" with a preacher occurred that before his wife's death. Both of these are extremely minor, but they did catch my eye.
I can see how they occurred. When a writer gets close to finishing a monster of a book like this one, it would be hourly work not to make your eyes glaze over when editing and re-checking facts in timelines. (The text of the book alone is 455 pages, btw, in the first edition; the notes and acknowledgements are another 30-something.)
Overall, I'd say this is not a swashbuckling adventure of a biography. It's unlikely to appeal to broad audience but it would enlighten and delight Styron fans -- especially those who love "A Tidewater Morning" and "Sophie's Choice."
December 6, 2012
Can't put this down. I think of William Styron as one of our finest American writers; to mine the depths of his becoming the great novelist he is considered today, is to learn of his struggles in his youth, the influence of living abroad in the 1950's, and the amazing world of publishing decades before it's current demise. James West is a fine writer, and the biography is engaging and brilliantly researched.
August 31, 2012
The author did great research, and obviously had access to Bill Styron who was still living at the time the book was written. What I appreciated most about this book was the descriptions of how Styron made the complicated decisions about what voice would be his in his novels, and how to tell the story. Styron typically worked 4-8 years on each novel, quite carefully crafting the story before he would put pen to paper.
June 19, 2016
A mind trip that feels a bit worn out. Billy Pilgrim is the ultimate floater and nothing seems to surprise him. He is the epitome of whatever happens, happens. A true anti-hero in every sense of the word. I choose not to be a Billy Pilgrim. We have more control of our lives than we think.
January 22, 2016
I've never read a book by William Styron but I found this biography interesting.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews