Four novels—including the Pulitzer Prize winner The Confessions of Nat Turner and the National Book Award winner Sophie's Choice —by the great American writer.Lie Down in Darkness is William Styron's stunning debut: a classic portrait of one Southern family's tragic spiral into destruction. Set This House on Fire is a story of evil and redemption involving thr...

“Styron’s most impressive performance. . . . Belongs on that small shelf reserved for American masterpieces.” —Washington Post Book WorldWinner of the 1980 National Book Award, Sophie’s Choice is William Styron’s classic novel of love, survival, and regret, set in Brooklyn in the wake of the Second World War. The novel centers on three characters: Stingo, a sexually frustrated aspiring novelist; Nathan, his charismatic but violent Jewish neighbor;...

The New York Times– bestselling memoir of crippling depression and the struggle for recovery by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Sophie's Choice .In the summer of 1985, William Styron became numbed by disaffection, apathy, and despair, unable to speak or walk while caught in the grip of advanced depression. His struggle with the disease culminated in a wave of obsession that...

William Styron’s stunning debut: a classic portrait of one Southern family’s tragic spiral into destructionFirst published to wide critical acclaim in 1951, Lie Down in Darkness centers on the Loftis family—Milton and Helen and their daughters, Peyton and Maudie. The story, told through a series of flashbacks on the day of Peyton’s funeral, is a powerful depiction of a family doomed by its failure to forget and its inability to love.Written in mast...

The "magnificent" Pulitzer Prize–winning and #1 New York Times –bestselling novel about the preacher who led America's bloodiest slave revolt ( The New York Times ).The Confessions of Nat Turner is William Styron's complex and richly drawn imagining of Nat Turner, the leader of the 1831 slave rebellion in Virginia that led to the deaths of almost sixty men, women, and ch...

From the National Book Award–winning and New York Times– bestselling author of Sophie's Choice : three novellas of a young writer's journey to adulthood.In Love Day, twenty-year-old Paul Whitehurst is a Marine lieutenant during World War II, waiting to land on Okinawa, wrestling with anxiety and memories of his boyhood in Virginia.In Shadrach, ten-year-...

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 girlf...

"One of the finest novels of our times," a New York Times bestseller about a murder in Italy from the National Book Award–winning author of Sophie's Choice ( San Francisco Chronicle ).Shortly after World War II, in the village of Sambuco, Italy, two American men—Peter Leverett and Cass Kinsolving—crossed paths with Mason Flagg. They b...

A vital, illuminating collection of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner’s elegant, passionately engaged nonfictionMy Generation is the definitive gathering of William Styron’s nonfiction, exposing the core of this greatly gifted, highly convivial, and profoundly serious artist from his literary emergence in the 1950s to his death in 2006.Here are fifty years of Styron’s essays, memoirs, reviews, op-eds, articles, eulogies, and speeche...

From 1947 to 1949, William Styron twice attempted to write a novel under the working title Inheritance of Night. On the third attempt he produced the award-winning Lie Down in Darkness, which when published in September 1951 established him as one of the most promising writers of his generation. Duke University Press is proud to publish, in facsimile form, the long-lost drafts of Styron's earliest versions of Lie Down in Darkness.Although Styron began the ...

“I’ve finally pretty much decided what to write next—a novel based on Nat Turner’s rebellion,” twenty-six-year-old William Styron confided to his father in a letter he wrote on May 1, 1952. Styron would not publish his Pulitzer Prize–winning The Confessions of Nat Turner until 1967, but this letter undercuts those critics who later attacked the writer as an opportunist capitalizing on the heated racial climate of the late 1960s. From 1943 to 1953, Styron wrote over one hundred letters to W...

Set in a military hospital during WWII, a darkly humorous play by the National Book Award–winning and New York Times– bestselling author of Sophie's Choice .In the summer of 1943, a young Marine named Wally Magruder arrives at a Navy hospital in the American South, stricken with what doctors diagnose as a severe case of syphilis. Trapped in the stifling confines of the urology w...