William Styron (born 1925) was a Southern writer of novels and articles. His major works were Lie Down in Darkness,The Long March, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice. His major theme was the response of basically decent people to such cru...

The critics received Lie Down in Darkness (1951) as an auspicious first novel, perhaps the best to appear since World War II. Its style, if reminiscent of Faulkner, was distinctly the author's own; its psychological insights, accurate; and its moral visi...

The critics received Lie Down in Darkness (1951) as an auspicious first novel, perhaps the best to appear since World War II. If reminiscent of Faulkner, its style was distinctly the author's own; its psychological insights, accurate; and its moral visio...

William Styron. Lie Down in Darkness. Introduction by James L. W. West III. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.139 pp. Cloth $17.95. Few American novelists have had so spectacular a debut as William Styron. In 1951, at age twenty-six, Styron published his first novel,...

When Williams Styron's Lie Down in Darkness first appeared in 1951 reviewers were eager to highlight the novel's Faulknerian qualities. Malcolm Cowley's laudatory New Republic review was entitled "The Faulkner Pattern," and Robert Gorham Davis, writing in the American Scholar, noted that "Styron...

[The] feeling of war as the condition of life pervades all of Styron's works: in Lie Down in Darkness, Peyton Loftis commits suicide on the day the bomb is dropped on Nagasaki; in Set This House on Fire Cass Kinsolving traces the beginning of his self-destructive striving to his experiences in World War II, which drove him to the psychiatric ward. And even The Confessions of Nat Turner, although set a full century earlier, is informed by the spirit of the battlefield. Besides being inescapable, war i...