3 William Styron Books You Must Read In Your Lifetime

Posted by rheanasmith on October 1st, 2019

William Clark Styron was an American essayist and novelist who won some of the prominent literary awards for his immense contribution in the literature field. Styron was best known for his novels, that includes Lie Down in Darkness (1951), which is acclaimed to be his first work, and was published when he was 26 and Sophie's Choice (1979), a story that is told through the eyes of a young aspirational writer from the South, about a Catholic survivor of Auschwitz and her brilliant but mad Jewish lover in postwar Brooklyn. There are several websites currently available where William Styron reads his works and you can enjoy the story in his excellent voice.  

In the year 1985, he went through a serious depression condition. By the time he recovered from that, Styron was able to write the memoir Darkness Visible (1990), which he later became best known for during the last two decades of his life. If you haven’t read any of his works till now, here are some of his best works in greater details. This will help you choosing the one that precisely matches with your liking.

• Sophie's Choice

This was published in 1979 and it concerns the relationships between three individuals sharing a boarding house in Brooklyn. Stingo, a young energetic writer from the South, and the Jewish scientist Nathan Landau and his partner Sophie, a Polish Catholic survivor of the Nazi concentration camps. Sophie's Choice won the US National Book Award for Fiction in the year 1980.

• The Confessions Of Nat Turner

The Confessions of Nat Turner won the Pulitzer Prize in the year 1967. It was presented as a first-person narrative by historical figure Nat Turner. The novel talks about the slave revolt in Virginia in 1831. It is based on The Confessions of Nat Turner: The Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Virginia, a personal account of Turner's confessions published by a lawyer named Thomas Ruffin Gray in the year 1831.

•  Darkness Visible

Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness is a memoir created by Styron about his descent into depression and the triumph of recovery. It is one of the last books created by Styron and is now considered as to be one of the most influential works by Styron. This book also played a major role in raising awareness for depression, that was not clearly understood during that time. The book was first published in 1989 in Vanity Fair. Interestingly, this book grew out of a lecture Styron delivered at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

If you liked reading these books, you can start exploring his other contribution in the field of writing.

Author: The author is a blogger and the article is about William Styron best books.