Captain Mannix of
The Long March (1956) limps painfully and defiantly on a forced road march, excoriated verbally and physically by an unbending military authority. Cass Kinsolving's nightmare of alcoholism in
Set This House on Fire (1960), an underrated novel of despair and violence, closely parallels Styron 's later battle with depression. The psychologically tormented title character of
The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) mounts an ill-fated rebellion against his white masters in 1831 Virginia. In
Sophie's Choice (1979) the title character's escalatingly horrible choices haunt her and eventually shock the narrator, Stingo, who seeks expiation from his own demons through the telling of Sophie's story.
William Styron was born in Newport News, Virginia, on 11 June 1925. His father, William Clark Styron, was an engineer at the Newport News shipyard. His mother, Pauline Margaret Abraham Styron, died when Styron was thirteen. An energetic youth, he was sent to Christchurch, an Episcopal preparatory school in Virginia. At Davidson College -- a scholastically demanding Presbyterian college near Charlotte, North Carolina -- he studied with other young southern men, receiving a traditional education grounded in the classics and overlaid with a proper Protestant sense of hard work and discipline.
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