Styron has admitted that he borrowed the structure of beginning his novel with Nat Turner's awaiting his execution and recollecting his entire life and mission in his cell from Albert Camus' The Stranger (1942), but the strategy of a white man writing as a black slave has never been accomplished before. The confessional mode, however, does link Styron to several contemporary writers of the 1960s and after, such as Norman Mailer, Joan Didion and E. L. Doctorow, who have also written first-person narratives that involve actual historical events.