Styron often explores in his fiction the loss of innocence and the discovery of knowledge, a psychological quest in the form of an overarching fable in which his main character discovers the intolerable certainties of life — death, loss, race, war, self-destruction — through a process of recollection and dramatically presented revelations. All of his major novels can be read essentially as fictionalized memoirs or meditations about the past, often beginning at the end of the story and unearthing it slowly, as in Lie Down in Darkness (1951) and The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), or looking back on the past from a particular present moment in an effort to re-create and discover where things went wrong and how revelations of unbearable tragedy affect the writer and his characters, as in Set This House on Fire (1960) and Sophie's Choice (1979). In A Tidewater Morning Styron re-enacts this same process...