William Styron

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William Styron

William Clark Styron, Jr. (born June 11, 1925 in Newport News , Virginia , † November 1, 2006 in Martha's Vineyard , Massachusetts ) was an American writer .

biography

William Styron was born in Newport News, Virginia, not far from the site of the slave rebellion of 1831 that later became the subject of his most famous and widely discussed novel. After studying at Duke University in North Carolina and later at the New School of Social Research in New York, he volunteered in the Marine Corps during World War II , but did not participate in the war. After working for a short time in the editing department of McGraw-Hill Verlag, he stayed for a long time in Europe, especially in Paris and Rome , before settling in Roxbury, Connecticut after a short military service as a reserve officer during the Korean War in 1954 , where he devoted himself exclusively to his writing.

Styron wrote essays and reviews for many American magazines and wrote numerous socially critical novels, which are in the narrative tradition of the south of William Faulkner , Robert Penn Warren and Thomas Wolfe . With Faulkner and Warren, Styron not only has a southern background in common, but also tries to portray the character or destiny of man and society through the past and history in the fictional world of his characters. His novels are particularly accentuated by the fact that their setting is not set in Mississippi or Kentucky , as in most of the works of the other two authors , but instead primarily in Virginia as the "cradle of the American nation".

For the novel The Confessions of Nat Turner he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1968 , and in that year he was also elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1970 he was awarded the William Dean Howells Medal for this novel by the American Academy of Arts and Letters , of which he had been a member since 1966 . In 1985 he was honored with the French Prix ​​mondial Cino Del Duca for his life's work . William Styron died on 1 November 2006 on the island of Martha's Vineyard in the US state of Massachusetts on a pneumonia .

Styron suffered from severe depression . He processed his experience in this regard, among other things, in 1989 in the work Darkness Visible .

Works

Novels (selection)

Autobiographical texts

Film adaptations

  • 1998 - Shadrach - The Homecoming of the Stranger ( Shadrach )
  • 1982 - Sophie's decision
  • 1968 - crooks, crowns and jewels ( Crooks and coronets )

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Franz Link: William Styron, in: Franz Link: American narrators since 1950 - Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn u. a. 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , pp. 41-59, here p. 41.
  2. ^ Franz Link: William Styron, in: Franz Link: American narrators since 1950 - Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn u. a. 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , pp. 41-59, here pp. 41f.
  3. ^ A Howling Tempest in the Brain , NYT, August 19, 1990, p. 7007001, accessed April 5, 2018
  4. ^ Illuminating depression , The Guardian, March 7, 2011, accessed April 5, 2018
personal data
SURNAME Styron, William
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Styron, William Clark (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH June 11, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH Newport News , Virginia
DATE OF DEATH November 1, 2006
Place of death Martha's Vineyard , Massachusetts