William Styron
William Clark Styron, Jr. ( born June 11, 1925 in Newport News, Virginia; † 1 November, 2006 Martha 's Vineyard, Massachusetts ) was an American writer.
Biography
William Styron was born in Newport News in the U.S. state of Virginia, not far from the scene of the slave rebellion of 1831, which later became the subject of his most famous and most discussed novel. After graduating from Duke University in North Carolina and later at the New School of Social Research in New York, he reports during the Second World War as a volunteer in the Marine Corps, but was not able to enter battle. After working for a short time in the editing of the McGraw -Hill publishing company, he held for a long time in Europe, particularly in Paris and Rome, in order to subsequently after a shorter military service as a reserve officer during the Korean War in 1954 in Roxbury, Connecticut, to settle where dedicating himself exclusively to his literary activity.
Styron wrote for many American magazines and has written numerous essays and criticism socially critical novels that are in the storytelling tradition of the South by William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren and Thomas Wolfe. With Faulkner and Warren Styron has not only the südstaatlichen background together, but is equally keen to show the embossing or destiny of man and of society through past and history in the fictional world of his characters. Are particularly accentuated his novels already in that its venue is not located as in most works of the other two authors in Mississippi or Kentucky but instead primarily in Virginia as the " birthplace of the American nation."
For the novel The Confessions of Nat Turner, he was awarded the 1968 Pulitzer Prize. For his life's work in 1985 he was awarded the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca French. William Styron died on 1 November 2006 on the island of Martha 's Vineyard in the U.S. state of Massachusetts from pneumonia.
Works
Novels (selection)
- Secure in the bosom of the night ( Lie Down in Darkness ), 1951
- The Confessions of Nat Turner ( The Confessions of Nat Turner ), 1967
- Sophie's Choice ( Sophie 's Choice ), 1979
Autobiographical texts
- Fall into the night. History of depression ( Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness ), 1990