“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 "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...

"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...

"Thoughtful, candid" essays from the National Book Award–winning and #1 New York Times –bestselling author of Sophie's Choice ( The Christian Science Monitor ).This Quiet Dust is a compilation of William Styron's nonfiction writings that confront significant moral questions with precision and vigor. He examines topics as diver...

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time"[One morning] in the early spring, I woke up with the remembrance of a girl I'd once known, Sophie. It was a very vivid half-dream, half-revelation, and all of a sudden I realized that hers was a story I had to tell." That very day, William Styron began writing the first chapter of Sophie's Choice.First published in 1979, this complex and ambitious novel opens with Stingo, a young south...

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...

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...

After the great success in 1990 of Darkness Visible, his memoir of depression and recovery, William Styron wrote more frequently in an introspective, autobiographical mode. Havanas in Camelot brings together fourteen of his personal essays, including a reminiscence of his brief friendship with John F. Kennedy; a recollection of the power and ceremony on display at the inauguration of François Mitterrand; memoirs of Truman Capote, James Baldwin, and Terry Southern; a meditation on ...

“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...

A New York Times bestseller by the author of Sophie's Choice: Two Americans search for the truth about a mysterious long-ago murder in Italy.Shortly after World War II, in the village of Sambuco, Italy, two men—Virginia attorney Peter Leverett and South Carolina artist Cass Kinsolving—crossed paths with Mason Flagg. They both had their own reactions to the gregarious and charismatic movie mogul's son. For the impressionable Peter, it was something...

Lie Down in Darkness traces the tragic fate of a Southern family with acute sensitivity, in a style that mirrors the inner lives of its four major characters. The parents are estranged, with each favoring one of their two daughters. The father dotes on Peyton, the family beauty, while the mother is devoted to Maudie, the disabled child. The novel, told in flashbacks, opens with Peyton's funeral after her emotional unraveling and suicide. The passage Styron reads here shows Maudie'...

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...