William Styron 's first novel, Lie Down in Darkness (1951), placed him in the vanguard of promising young American authors of the post-World War II era, along with such writers as J. D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Joseph Heller, and Philip Roth. While some of those writers have been more prolific than Styron and are perhaps better known to a general readership, none surpasses Styron in his ambitious themes, his wonderfully crafted style, or his intelligently drawn characters. Ironically, Styron 's greater public recognition results from his recent appearances on magazine-format television shows, discussing his successful emergence from depression. His nonfiction account of his descent into depression, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990) -- the title of which is drawn from John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) -- bears a perhaps subconscious similarity to the title of his first novel.

All of Styron 's novels probe into the...