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...

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...

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...

The novels of William Styron have won major literary awards, received tremendous popular attention, and been the subject of controversy. Styron's two best known novels, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) and Sophie's Choice (1979), deal...

William Clark Styron, Jr. (June 11 1925 – November 1 2006) was an eminent American novelist and essayist. Before the publication of his memoir Darkness Visible in 1990, Styron was best known for his novels which...

WILLIAM STYRON, WHO DIED on November 1, 2006, left readers with many experiences and many shared lives--from the slave revolt described in THE Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) to the Holocaust aftermath detailed in Sophie's Choice (1979). As one of the leading novelists...

His main problem was life Like many of his literary heroes, William Styron wrote to make sense of the world ON the door to William Styron's studio was a quotation from Gustave Flaubert: "Be regular and orderly in your life so...

Who was Mailer? He growled, boxed, inhabited the Earth. Breslin: 'People think he was a crazed creature—he wasn't.' MORE ... The subject was old age. Norman Mailer said there was a grace in aging. He didn’t feel as angry or self-involved as he once did;...

His friends all tell similar stories: Norman Mailer at a dinner party, awards ceremony or afternoon gathering, hobbling on canes up or down a few steps or a flight of stairs, short of breath, as if getting from one place to another was a struggle...

In this excerpt, Cologne-Brookes sees in The Long March signs of a change in Styron's emphases, from his earlier view that literature is a way to achieve harmony in a chaotic world to his later conviction that art is necessarily part of a dialogue with sociohistorical matters.

Below, Ratner provides an overview of the techniques and symbolism that Styron uses in The Long March "enlarging the narrative into his general theme of rebellion."

In the excerpt below, Malin discusses symbolism, characterization, and Styron's use of body imagery and contrast.