Some twelve years later,
Sophie's Choice combined the previous themes of oppression, racism, and slavery with that of Nazi terror. As with the controversial reception of the Nat Turner novel,
Sophie's Choice was both hailed as a courageous, serious Holocaust novel and, because of its focus on a Catholic Polish survivor of Auschwitz, criticized for universalizing and trivializing the Holocaust. The pervasive sense of melancholy in the novel resurfaced in Styron's own life. In
Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990), Styron described to wide public acclaim his own fierce struggle with an almost fatal clinical depression.
William Clark Styron Jr. was born on 11 June 1925 in Newport News, Virginia, a busy city of the New South, where his father, William Clark Styron, worked as an engineer at the local shipyard. While his mother, Pauline Margaret Abraham, came from a well-to-do business family in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, his father's family was deeply rooted in the South. In fact, as later fictionalized in Sophie's Choice, Styron's paternal grandmother, Marianna Clark, descended from prominent North Carolina planters and slaveholders. She told young William many stories of her pre-Civil War youth and of slavery.
