William Styron: a Life Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

William Styron: a Life Book

"If one wishes to know William Styron, one must walk with him," this biography teasingly begins. Great expectation! Will readers come to know Styron through conversations, reminiscences, and literary gossip as we "walk" with West and Styron? All we'll come to know, through the daily walks, are the "facts" of Styron's two retrievers (a matronly golden and a rambunctious young Labrador) and their geography. From October to June, they walk in Roxbury, Connecticut; from June to September, on Martha's Vineyard. "If one has taken these walks over many years and has listened to these talks ... one knows that Styron will have revealed very little about himself in what he has said," West seems to say with a sigh at the end of his preamble. It is in the work, alleges West, that Styron the man is most revealed. And in the exegesis of Styron's novels lies the strength of this biography. West's gifts come to light when he assumes the role of literary detective. His reconstruction of the gestation and birth pains of Styron's great novels shows an interest sparked by the questions of literary form and content. With these discussions the biography crisply snaps together. Meanwhile, the chronology remains the armature. West marches Styron's ancestors steadily toward the moment of Styron's birth in Newport News, Virginia, picking dutifully through the detritus. Reader interest is piqued when Styron's parents are summoned from the wings--particularly with the entrance of Pauline Abraham, Styron's talented mother (a musician who studied in Vienna and would prove herself to be a fiercely adventurous young woman in pre-World War I America). A minutely detailed history of Newport News, Virginia, where Styron was born and raised in the years following World War I, reveals his recurring thematic interests--racial segregation and the "unknowable" culture of black Americans. It is Styron's New York City years that makes for compelling reading. While enrolled in the New School for Social Research, for example, and mentored by Hiram Haydn, Styron teetered, at 22, on the brink of his literary career. The angst of the young author struggling through issues of writer's block, financial stress, and the problems peculiar to the work that would become Lie Down in Darkness will amaze, perhaps reassure, aspiring writers. Such would not be forgiven today, for Styron's career flourished in that completely unprecedented era where the publishing world existed to serve and nourish new talent, free of today's marketplace concerns with bestsellers, blockbusters, and the bottom line. Read, and bid a grave farewell to our gone and golden literary era. West has little new to add about the recent years (Styron was 72 with the publication of this biography). Styron's later life has been made so public with the hugely successful Darkness Visible (1990), which did much to validate the experiences of those who suffer from depression. West's treatment of Styron's notorious depression is candid, but in the end, lacks depth. The reiteration of a near fatal depression triggered by a carelessly prescribed series of sedatives is instructive, but West passes up an opportunity to discuss the role Styron's alcohol dependency played. We might have been spared the obligatory nod to Styron's ancestry; the comments on little Billy's boyhood (so he had pretty brown eyes, so he had chicken pox and verbal precocity), those tiresome details that strain for significance. We don't need to know about Styron's first grade experiences in order to appreciate the mind behind Sophie's Choice. A rather flat coda disappointingly concludes this 450 page account of the rich--in work and love--and complicated life of an American master. --Hollis Giammetteo Read More

from£29.56 | RRP: £20.34
* Excludes Voucher Code Discount Also available Used from £11.93
  • Product Description

    On the door to William Styron's writing studio is a quotation from Flaubert: "Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work." Styron has lived by that injunction, addressing major subjects--slavery, the Holocaust, mental illness--with a power that has gripped readers around the world.

    Though reared in the South, Styron spent most of his adult working life in the North. His first book, Lie Down in Darkness, was a brilliant debut, which inspired him to go abroad for the first time. In Paris, he fell in with other young American writers and helped found The Paris Review along with George Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen. Styron spent a year in Rome, married, and returned to the States.

    After writing Set This House on Fire, an ambitious novel set in Italy, he began working on The Confessions of Nat Turner, the moving story of a slave rebellion in Virginia. James Baldwin, who lived in a small house on Styron's property in Connecticut during this period, became a sounding board, as well as an inspiration, for the novel. It was also about this time that Styron began lifelong associations with Philip Roth, Arthur Miller, Carlos Fuentes, Willie Morris, and, in particular, James Jones. Readers will be fascinated by the full story of Styron's feud with Norman Mailer, an estrangement so severe that each refused to speak to the other for almost twenty-five years.

    Styron's political life has been active, from his presence at the riot-torn l968 Democratic national convention in Chicago to his controversial long-term opposition to the death penalty.

    The Confessions of Nat Turner made Styron famous, but it also brought him under attack. At one point, the explosive reaction to the novel led Styron to imagine that his wife, Rose, had been abducted.

    In Sophie's Choice, Styron turned to another charged subject--the Holocaust--and Auschwitz became the focus of his life for several years. The result was a novel that added a major tragic figure, Sophie Zawistowska, to the enduring literature of our time.

    In the aftermath of a mental breakdown, Styron produced the unflinchingly candid Darkness Visible, a book that dramatically altered the nation's negative perception of clinical depression.

    James West has studied William Styron's life and career for over twenty years. He has had complete access not only to Styron's papers, letters, and manuscripts, but also to his friends, and has produced an outstanding portrait of one of the most controversial and admired authors of his generation.

  • 0679410546
  • 9780679410546
  • James West
  • 1 March 1998
  • Random House USA Inc
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 506
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. If you click through any of the links below and make a purchase we may earn a small commission (at no extra cost to you). Click here to learn more.

Would you like your name to appear with the review?

We will post your book review within a day or so as long as it meets our guidelines and terms and conditions. All reviews submitted become the licensed property of www.find-book.co.uk as written in our terms and conditions. None of your personal details will be passed on to any other third party.

All form fields are required.