SOURCE: "Looking Back: The Long March," in This Quiet Dust and Other Writings, Vintage International, 1993, pp. 333-35.

In this essay, which first appeared as the introduction to the Norwegian edition of The Long March in 1975, Styron discusses the autobiographical experiences that inform his work and recounts his own artistic process of shaping these experiences into the novella.

Although not nearly so long nor so ambitious as my other works, The Long March achieved within its own scope, I think, a unity and a sense of artistic inevitability which still, ten years after the writing, I rather wistfully admire. Lest I appear immodest, I would hasten to add that I do not consider the book even remotely perfect, yet certainly every novelist must have within the body of his writing a work of which he recalls everything having gone just right during the composition: through some stroke of luck...