The Confessions of Nat Turner

A first-person narrative that depicts a good man's transformation into an avenging angel

Styron has brought to bear on the experience of the Afro-American his penetrating intelligence and his immense skills in creating character, writing dialogue and confronting explosive themes

Magnificent...It is one of those rare books that show us our American past, our present - ourselves - is a dazzling shaft of light...A triumph

Born at Newport News, Virginia, in 1925, William Styron was educated at Duke University. He served in the Marine Corps during the last war, and was recalled to service during the Korean War. After 1952, he lived mainly in Europe, before settling in a rural part of Connecticut.

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE 
 
In 1831 Nat Turner awaits death in a Virginia jail cell. He is a slave, a preacher, and the leader of the only effective slave revolt in the history of 'that peculiar institution'. William Styron's ambitious and stunningly accomplished novel is Turner's confession, made to his jailers under the duress of his God. Encompasses the betrayals, cruelties and humiliations that made up slavery - and that still sear the collective psyches of both races.

Darkness Visible

'Tremendous writing - honest and illuminating' Victoria Glendinning, New York Times

Hair-raising in the manner of A Tale of Horror by Edgar Allan Poe

As short as a hangman's rope and nearly as arresting - an essay of great gravity and resonance. Never has Styron used so few words so effectively

Born at Newport News, Virginia, in 1925, William Styron was educated at Duke University. He served in the Marine Corps during the last war, and was recalled to service during the Korean War. After 1952, he lived mainly in Europe, before settling in a rural part of Connecticut. He died in 2006.

This is a story of depression a condition that reduced William Styron from a person enjoying life and success as an acclaimed writer, to a man engulfed and menaced by mental anguish. With profound insight and remarkable candor, Styron tracks the progress of his madness, from the smothering misery and exhaustion, to the agony of composing his own suicide note and his eventual, hard-won recovery. Illuminating an illness that affects millions but which remains widely misunderstood, this book is about the darkness of depression, but it is also ultimately about survival and redemption.

This Quiet Dust

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sophie's Choice explores a range of moral, political, historical and literary subjects in this impressive collection of essays, threaded with personal memoirs

[Styron is] the most accomplished craftsman, and one of the most penetrating witnesses of our life

Styron has bought to bear his penetrating intelligence and immense skills in confronting explosive themes

One of those quintessentially American writers capable of blending the rugged with the romantic, the macho with the tender

[A man] whose fiction turned brutal truths into beauty

Born in Newport News, Virginia, in 1925, William Styron was educated at Duke University. He served in the Marine Corps during the last war, and was recalled to service during the Korean War. After 1952, he lived mainly in Europe, before settling in a rural part of Connecticut. William Styron died in 2006. 
 
He is the author of The Long March, Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire and Sophie's Choice. He has also published Darkness Visible, the collection This Quiet Dust and Other Writings, and A Tidewater Morning.

In This Quiet Dust, the first book of non-fiction by the Pulitzer Prize-wining author of Lie Down in Darkness and Sophie's Choice, William Styron addresses great moral issues with passion and precision. 
 
His writing is at once meditative and engaged, personal and erudite, whether he is covering the dark side of the American and European dream, exploring the greats of American literature, or exploring the nature of the American South. Throughout, Styron's warmth, humour and candour, coupled with a refusal to judge, make for stirring and stimulating reading.

The Long March

'There can be no doubt that Styron is the foremost writer of his generation' Wall Street Journal

William Styron is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Long March, Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner and Sophie's Choice. 
He has also published Darkness Visible , the remarkable story of his descent into depression, a collection, This Quiet Dust and Other Writings, and A Tidewater Morning. He lives in Roxbury, Connecticut, and Martha's Vineyard.

In the blaze of a Carolina summer, among the poison ivy and loblolly pines, eight Marines are killed almost casually by misfired mortar shells. Deciding that his battalion has been 'doping off', Colonel Templeton calls for a 36-mile forced march to inculcate discipline. The Long March is a searing account of this ferocious ordeal - and of the two officers who resist.

The Suicide Run

A powerful insight into the early years of one of America's greatest modern writers.

In his elegant, sometimes ornate, prose, Styron balances a loathing of military life with a respect for the human nobility it grants the most unlikely candidates

This group of previously unpublished stories by Pulitzer Prize-winner William Styron crackle with youthful virtuosity

What intrigues here is the way all soldiers, whether or not they ever see combat, still live with the notion: I am expendable canon fodder.  And that sort of existential knowledge makes even the toughest Marine pause for thought

This book will be welcomed by admirers of Styron's work

There's such a depth to the characterization and mood here, with doubt, guilt, bravado, lust and more to be felt by the heroes, who of course never fit any such token template

Styron's ornate prose has a wonderful rhythmic flow. The title story, a sultry, white-knuckle sex odyssey across the US, is a particular gem. Told with a frenetic humour that bleeds out into lyrical disquiet, it paints a vivid picture of young men trying in vain to drown out their own death knell

William Styron (1925-2006), a native of the Tidewater region of Virginia, was a graduate of Duke University and a veteran of the Marine Corps. His books include Lie Down in Darkness, The Long March, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, Sophie's Choice, This Quiet Dust, Darkness Visible and A Tidewater Morning. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the Howells Medal, the American Book Award and the Legion d'Honneur. With his wife, the poet and activist Rose Styron, he lived for most of his adult life in Roxbury, Connecticut, and in Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts.

The five personal and intensely powerful tales that make up this collection draw upon William Styron's real-life experiences in the US Marine Corps, and give us an insight into the early life of one of America's greatest modern writers. 
 
The stories are set in the gruelling camps and sweltering training fields which mark the limbo point between civilian life and the horrors of war. The stories tell of young men embarking on suicidal 1000 mile roundtrips to New York to see their girlfriends on 36 hour leave periods; the surreal experience of being conscripted for a second time to serve in the Korean War; and the frustration and isolation of returning home when service is over. 
 
The Suicide Run brings to life the drama, inhumanity, absurdity and heroism that forever changed the men who served in the Marine Corps.

Sophie's Choice

The movie was Oscar-nominated and the book was banned in libraries across the States. This heartbreaking, compassionate and controversial novel interweaves themes of survivor guilt, madness and betrayal.

A masterpiece, [which leaves] more conventional treatments of the Holocaust, such as Schindler's List, looking obtuse and sentimental

William Styron's Sophie's Choice is a landmark of mid-20th-century American fiction - an impressively fat novel that most literate Americans claim to have read even if they haven't

A compassionate, brilliantly written novel

A weighty, passionate novel . . . courageous [and] masterly

Styron is a writer's writer, capable of setting a pastoral idyll in Brooklyn, and the traumas narrated occur alongside a classic American coming-of-age story

If you’re not sobbing at the end of this tale of tortured souls, consult a doctor immediately because you might be dead

Born in Newport News, Virginia, in 1925, William Styron was educated at Duke University. He served in the Marine Corps during the last war, and was recalled to service during the Korean War. After 1952, he lived mainly in Europe, before settling in a rural part of Connecticut. He died in 2006.

In this extraordinary novel, Stingo, an inexperienced twenty-two year old Southerner, takes us back to the summer of 1947 and a boarding house in a leafy Brooklyn suburb. There he meets Nathan, a fiery Jewish intellectual; and Sophie, a beautiful and fragile Polish Catholic. Stingo is drawn into the heart of their passionate and destructive relationship as witness, confidant and supplicant. Ultimately, he arrives at the dark core of Sophie's past: her memories of pre-war Poland, the concentration camp and - the essence of her terrible secret - her choice.

A Tidewater Morning

Rich and remarkable.The "Tidewater" stories stand as one of Styron's finest works' Los Angeles Times

In this brilliant collection of 'long short stories', the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sophie's Choice returns to the coastal Virginia setting of his first novels. Through the eyes of a man recollecting three episodes from his youth, William Styron explores with new eloquence death, loss, war and racism.

Set This House On Fire

The day after Peter Leverett met his old friend Mason Flagg in Italy, Mason was found dead. The hours leading up to his death were a nightmare for Peter - both in their violence and in their maddening unreality.The blaze of events which followed was, Peter soon realised, ignited by a conflict between two men: Mason Flagg himself and Cass Kinsolving, a tortured, self-destructive painter, a natural enemy and prey to the monstrous evil of Mason Flagg.  Three events - murder, rape and suicide - explode in the is relentless and passionate novel, almost overwhelming in its conception of the varieties of good and evil.

Lie Down In Darkness

In this novel, the South looms dark and ominous in the background with its Biblical rhetoric, its conflict between a tradition of religious fundamentalism and modern scepticism, racial contrasts and the industrialisation of a rural society. But more than a novel of time and place, it is the story of a tormented family submerged in infidelity and driven by a vengeful love that is blocked, hurt and perverted. Peyton Loftis, who frantically needs a husband precisely because she loves her father; the decadent Milton, whose infidelity has made his marriage no more than a stage drama; and Helen, his wife, who loves only what she can control - her crippled daughter Maudie, or the childish part of her husband. This extraordinarily powerful novel is the portrait of a family who, in the words of Sir Thomas Browne in his URN BURIAL, 'all lie down in darkness'.

William Styron

Imagine our joy when Vintage announced that it is publishing a collection of easily digestible books from the world’s most celebrated writers on the experiences that make us human… They look good and read well. That’s win/win in our book.

Vintage Minis

How does a writer compose a suicide note? This was not a question that the prize-winning novelist William Styron had ever contemplated before. In this true account of his depression, Styron describes an illness that reduced him from a successful writer to a man arranging his own destruction. He lived to give us this gripping description of his descent into mental anguish, and his eventual success in overcoming a little-understood yet very common condition. 
 
The unabridged text of Darkness Visible by William Styron 
 
VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. 
 
A series of short books by the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human 
 
Also in the Vintage Minis series: 
Swimming by Roger Deakin 
Babies by Anne Enright 
Calm by Tim Parks 
Work by Joseph Heller

William Styron

Praise for Depression

As short as a hangman's rope and nearly as arresting - an essay of great gravity and resonance. Never has Styron used so few words so effectively

Imagine our joy when Vintage announced that it is publishing a collection of easily digestible books from the world’s most celebrated writers on the experiences that make us human… They look good and read well. That ...

Books by William Styron

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter