William Styron, 1925 - 2006.

William Styron, the novelist from the American South whose explorations of difficult historical and moral questions earned him a place among the leading literary figures of the post-World War II generation, died yesterday on Martha's Vineyard, Mass, where he had a home. He was 81.

[...]

Sophie's Choice rose to the top of The New York Times best-seller list, won the 1980 American Book Award for fiction and was made into a successful movie, starring Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline, and an opera by the English composer Nicholas Maw. And once again, a Styron project aroused controversy.

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the NYT.

See also the Wikipedia entry and George Plimpton's interview for the Paris Review.

Updated through 11/7.

Update, 11/3: An appreciation from Michiko Kakutani in the NYT: "All his novels, Mr Styron once observed, focused on one recurrent theme: 'the catastrophic propensity on the part of human beings to attempt to dominate one another.' He speculated in a 1982 interview that this theme found him, as a result of being a young soldier in World War II, contemplating 'the forces in history that simply wipe you out'... Although Mr Styron's ouevre seems somewhat slender in retrospect, each of his major novels built upon its predecessor's achievements, working variations on earlier ideas, while amplifying them through the echo chamber of history. Mr Styron observed after Sophie's Choice that he no longer saw a writer's career as 'a series of mountain peaks' but rather as a 'rolling landscape' with vistas perhaps less spectacular, yet every bit as resonant as those 'theatrical Wagnerian dramas with peak after peak.'"

Update, 11/4: A 1990 interview on Fresh Air.

Update, 11/5: Robert McCrum in the Observer: "With his departure, the long aftermath of the Second World War seems almost concluded."

Updates, 11/7: Lawrence Downes in the NYT: "William Styron's accomplishments as a novelist were justly praised after he died last week. His unorthodox achievement in medicine, as the author of an invaluable primer on clinical depression, got less attention, but is no less worth celebrating."

Nell Casey in Slate: "Styron was certainly not the first celebrated writer to produce a personal account of his own emotional plunge.... But Styron described his illness with a distinct lyrical clarity. He offered up the secrets of his despair but also maintained a degree of formality - occasionally trading the word I for one, as in 'one does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails but is attached wherever one goes.' This choice gave his words a sense of restraint but not withholding - an elegant high-wire act."

Posted by dwhudson at November 2, 2006 12:21 AM