Few modern American novelists have dared as much as William Styron in writing The Confessions of Nat Turner. A white man and a Tidewater Virginian by birth, Styron put himself inside the life and mind of Nat Turner, the black man who led a slave rebellion in Virginia in 1831. It is a true story told as a novel, though the author prefers to call it "a meditation on history" rather than a historical novel. Many black critics scorned it when it was published, refusing to accept Styron's bold conceit, though the novel won the 1967 Pulitzer Prize in fiction and was one of the most acclaimed American novels of its time. The Confessions of Nat Turner speaks in the first-person voice of Nat Turner himself. Styron based the novel on details of Turner's life and a pamphlet with the same title that was presented as evidence in Turner's trial. It is a shattering story that renders the horror of slavery -- so easily viewed as a faceless historical tragedy -- into unique human terms. Turner had been promised freedom by his first master but it was never granted, a taste of liberty that is unbearable in its cruelty. As a man, he can find no solace in the life that is given to him. Turner is a powerful, compelling figure, and with visions tormenting him, he inspires a small band of slaves to rise up against their masters. The rebellion is violent, resulting in the deaths of white men and women, but it is put down surely and bloodily, with an even higher casualty of black people. The fate of the rebels is inevitable, and it is from this perspective that Nat Turner seeks to understand his life. The concentrated but extravagant richness of Styron's writing, with its high rhetorical grace, is another bold choice he made in writing The Confessions of Nat Turner, at a time when writers were embracing the idea of less being more. As in his later novel Sophie's Choice, he does not tell a story that exists only in the past. Written in the mid-1960s, this novel addresses the horrible inequities that still existed then in the lives of African-Americans, and what those inequities do to the human equation. "He has begun the common history -- ours," the novelist James Baldwin wrote when The Confessions of Nat Turner was published. The New York Times called it "a triumph," and the Wall Street Journal wrote, "William Styron has written the true American tragedy ... There can be no doubt, now, that he is the foremost writer of his generation."

Judgment Day Above the barren, sandy cape where the river joins the sea, there is a promontory or cliff rising straight up hundreds of feet to form the last outpost of land. One must try to visualize a river estuary below this cliff, wide and muddy and shallow, and a confusion of choppy waves where the river merges with the sea and the current meets the ocean tide. It is afternoon. The day is clear, sparkling, and the sun seems to cast no shadow anywhere. It may be the commencement of spring or perhaps the end of summer; it matters less what the season is than that the air is almost seasonless-benign and neutral, windless, devoid of heat or cold. As always, I seem to be approaching this place alone in some sort of boat (it is a small boat, a skiff or maybe a canoe, and I am reclining in it comfortably; at least I have no sense of discomfort nor even of exertion, for I do not row-the boat is moving obediently to the river's sluggish seaward wallow), floating calmly toward the cape past which, beyond and far, deep blue, stretches the boundless sea. The shores of the river are unpeopled, silent; no deer run through the forests, nor do any gulls rise up from the deserted, sandy beaches. There is an effect of great silence and of an even greater solitude, as if life here had not so much perished as simply disappeared, leaving all-river shore and estuary and rolling sea-to exist forever unchanged like this beneath the light of a motionless afternoon sun. Now as I drift near the cape I raise my eyes to the promontory facing out upon the sea. There again I see what I know I will see, as always. In the sunlight the building stands white-stark white and serene against a blue and cloudless sky. It is square and formed of marble, like a temple, and is simply designed, possessing no columns or windows but rather, in place of them, recesses whose purpose I cannot imagine, flowing in a series of arches around its two visible sides. The building has no door, at least there is no door that I can see. Likewise, just as this building possesses neither doors nor windows, it seems to have no purpose, resembling, as I say, a temple-yet a temple in which no one worships, or a sarcophagus in which no one lies buried, or a monument to something mysterious, ineffable, and without name. But as is my custom whenever I have this dream or vision, I don't dwell upon the meaning of the strange building standing so lonely and remote upon its ocean promontory, for it seems by its very purposelessness to be endowed with a profound mystery which to explore would yield only a profusion of darker and perhaps more troubling mysteries, as in a maze. And so again it comes to me, this vision, in the same haunting and recurrent way it has for many years. Again I am in the little boat, floating in the estuary of a silent river toward the sea. And again beyond and ahead of me, faintly booming and imminent yet without menace, is the sweep of sunlit ocean. Then the cape, then the lofty promontory, and finally the stark white temple high and serene above all, inspiring in me neither fear nor peace nor awe, but only the contemplation of a great mystery, as I move out toward the sea. . . .

 

Powerful, prize-winning 1967 novel depicts the odyssey of Nat Turner, leader of first slave revolt in the US. Styron's novel was profoundly controversial; some felt that's a white author had no right to the subject matter. By the acclaimed author of SOPHIE'S CHOICE, SET THIS HOUSE ON FIRE and LIE DOWN IN DARKNESS.

A Southern-born novelist with anything but a predictably Southern voice or style, William Styron (b. 1925) has created a small but remarkable body of work. Styron was born in Newport News, Va., and graduated from Duke University in 1947, after serving in the Marine Corps. He began his first novel Lie Down in Darkness that same year, though it was not published until 1951, establishing him as one of the most important writers of his generation. After a period in Paris, where he co-founded The Paris Review, Styron returned to the U.S., where he published the acclaimed novella The Long March in 1953 and a large-scale novel Set This House On Fire seven years later.

It was the publication of The Confessions of Nat Turner in 1967 that made Styron a cause célèbre in American letters. Hugely controversial, the novel nonetheless was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for 1967 and later the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Another 12 years would pass before Styron's next novel appeared, and Sophie's Choice (1979) -- which dealt with the Holocaust -- drew a reaction virtually as passionate as that which greeted The Confessions of Nat Turner. Sophie's Choice won the National Book Award in fiction in 1980, and it was recently chosen both by the Modern Library and by the Radcliffe Publishing Course as one of the 100 best novels written in English in the 20th century.

In 1982, Styron published a collection of essays entitled This Quiet Dust and Other Writing. For much of the 1980s, he wrestled with clinical depression, an ordeal that he movingly described in Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, published as a book in 1990. The book was an expanded form of a Vanity Fair article that won a National Magazine Award in 1989. His most recent published work A Tidewater Morning includes three stories told by a boy who grows up in the Tidewater region of Virginia. One of the stories has been made into the film Shadrach, directed by Styron's daughter, for which the author collaborated on the screenplay.

 

The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron
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