Novelist William Styron Dead at 81

Posted on November 2, 2006

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist William Styron, the author of The Confessions of Nat Turner (which won the Pulitzer Prize) and Sophie's Choice/> has died. He was 81.

"I guess it felt like an opportunity," Kurt Vonnegut told The Associated Press as he talked about his longtime friend, who died Wednesday at age 81. "There had been such grotesque injustice to be fought against the Nazis, and the Japanese, and afterward you really got the sense that we were the good guys."
Styron, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist whose explorations of the darkest corners of the mind were charged by personal demons that nearly drove him to suicide, died in Martha's Vineyard, Mass. He had been in failing health for a long time.
Although often cited along with Vonnegut and Mailer as a leading writer of his generation, he produced little over the past 15 years. Styron was reportedly working on a military novel, yet published no full-length work of fiction after "Sophie's Choice," which came out in 1979.
"He had a lot of things wrong with him," Gore Vidal told the AP. "He had a bad ending."

Styron received some criticism for writing from the point of view of a black slave in Nat Turner and from the point of view of a Christian Polish woman who was a victim of the Holocaust in Sophie's Choice, although he was a recognized as a brilliant writer. His memoir about his battle against severe depression, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness is actually recommended reading for psychiatrists who treat depression.