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Yesterday America lost one of its most important novelists: William Styron died at 81 of pneumonia in a hospital on Martha's Vineyard.

Styron's novel 'Sophie's Choice' and its unforgettable film adaptation starring Meryl Streep as the tortured Holocaust survivor are perhaps his most enduring contributions to our culture. But his more controversial (though equally literary) 'The Confessions of Nat Turner' and 'Lie Down in Darkness' are classics, now.

In this video, Styron talked about the need for mirth in the midst of writing about dark, difficult things; perhaps one of his most interesting and important books is 'Darkness Visible,' his 1990 memoir and examination of his lifelong struggle with depression.

                                                  

William Styron knew that he wasn't perfect. He knew that our society isn't perfect. Like all great artists, he chose to continue creating, to continue confronting his demons and ours.

What Styron book do you count among your favorite reads? Why?

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• #4 Comment from slc94
  11/4/06 7:59 PM | Permalink

  Wow--that is sad, but interesting
• #3 Comment from c99blue
  11/3/06 12:06 AM | Permalink

  continued
  
  I believe the NY Times piece mentions that he suffered bouts of depression after giving up alcohol. A few months ago I listened to a very interesting interview with him on the Don Swain Web site. It's a site something like Michael Silverblatt's "Bookworm" on KCRW, devoted entirely to author interviews, although Swain's is an archive, it's no longer current like Silverblatt's.
  
  I recently read The Confessions of Nat Turner and enjoyed it. He gave an interview about the book, published in Kenneth Greenberg's recent anthology about Nat Turner. I definitely admire him for writing it.
• #2 Comment from c99blue
  11/3/06 12:04 AM | Permalink

  A tribute piece on The New York Times Web site describes his daily routine, which I find interesting. I forget the name of the town in Connecticut where he lived:
  
  . . . it was an unconventional routine he stuck to: sleep until noon; read and think in bed for another hour or so; lunch with Rose around 1:30 p.m.; run errands, deal with the mail, listen to music, daydream and generally ease into work until 4 p.m. Then up to the workroom and write for four hours, perfecting each paragraph until 200 or 300 words are completed; have cocktails and dinner with the family and friends at 8 or 9 p.m.; and stay up until 2 or 3 in the morning, drinking and reading and smoking and listening to music.
  
  With Rose to guard the door, run the household, organize their busy social life and look after the children, Mr. Styron followed this routine over the next 30 years. He turned out his novels slowly, yet he found time not only for occasional short stories, novellas, a movie script and a play about his wartime scare with venereal disease, “In the Clap Shack,” produced by the Yale Repertory Theater in 1972, but also for essays, reviews and occasional pieces, the best of which he collected in “This Quiet Dust and Other Writings” (1982).His life seemed to expand outside the door of his workroom as well. In 1966, he bought a house on harbor-front property on Martha’s Vineyard, where the family regularly vacationed and where he began to live from May through October. His circle of friends grew over the years to include people like Lillian Hellman, Art Buchwald, Philip Roth, James Jones, James Baldwin, E. L. Doctorow, Candice Bergen, Carly Simon, John F. and Jacqueline Kennedy, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Mike Wallace and even Norman Mailer, with whom he had feuded fiercely early in their acquaintanceship. . . .
  
• #1 Comment from williamemarks
  11/2/06 9:39 AM | Permalink

     I met William Styron one late morning on Martha's Vineyard.  It was a clear day filled with warmth and the caress of a light but steady southwesterly breeze.
    We sat on the porch of his home overlooking the outer harbor.
     When he talked about "Nat Turner", he told the story of how his elementary school took a "field day" into the country. At one stop, he noticed a marker that told how this was the place where the slave Nat Turner began his rebellion.
    Styron said he held this thought until it resurfaced in his mind during the Civil Rights movement. Styron fashioned a link between Nat Turner and the Civil Rights movement.
     After the interview, Bill allowed me to photograph him in his little writing room situated between the kitchen and garage. The room was dark except for light cast from window near his writing desk and nearby lamp. On top of his wood desk was a legal pad with a page filled with words written in pencil. Near the pad to the upper right side of the desk was a neat row of freshly sharpened pencils. Bill explained that "I like writing in pencil because I like to rewrite; it's easy to erase and make changes in pencil. I also like the way a pencil feels between my fingers. There is something about the tactile 'feel' of holding a pencil in my fingers that connects somehow to my mind."
     I snapped several photographs of Bill sitting at his desk with all those pencils. The soft light fell across the pencils, across his desk and writing pad, and then onto his face. I thought of the hours this man filled each day sitting in his chair, arms resting on his wooden desk as his fingers manifested words flowing from a matrix of thoughts with genesis unknown. This was Bill Styron's real home. A home where he sat alone with his thoughts in a quiet darkened room with pencil in hand. A room with one window that allowed a little light into his life as he gazed out upon the world he w