William Styron, the Pulitzer Prize-winning 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 at Martha's Vineyard, Mass., where he had a home. He was 81.
The cause was pneumonia, his daughter Alexandra Styron said.
Mr. Styron's early work, including “Lie Down in Darkness,” won him recognition as a distinctive voice of the South and an heir to William Faulkner. In subsequent fiction, like the critical and commercial success “Sophie's Choice,” he transcended his background and moved across cultural lines. Critics and readers alike ranked him among the best of the generation that succeeded Ernest Hemingway and Faulkner. “Lie Down in Darkness,” published in 1951, was a brooding, lyrical meditation on a young Southern girl's suicide, as viewed during her funeral by members of her family and their friends. In the narrative, language plays as important a role as characterization. The book established Mr. Styron as a writer to be watched.
Mr. Styron was born and raised in Newport News, Va., a city of the New South, whose leading industry was the shipyard where Mr. Styron's father worked. And it was an area that Mr. Styron wanted to escape.
So after moving north and writing “Lie Down in Darkness” in New York City, he traveled to Paris in 1952 and wrote a novella based on his experiences in the Marines. Published in 1953 in the first issue of the journal Discovery under the title “Long March,” it appeared as a Vintage paperback in 1955 as “The Long March.”
After a year in Italy, in 1954 he moved to Roxbury, Conn., and set about completing his second novel, “Set This House on Fire.” A technical advance over “Lie Down in Darkness,” this novel was richer in its storytelling and, full of the latest in Continental existentialism, distinctly not Southern.
It sold well. But still it remained a somewhat melodramatic portrait of a group of Americans in Italy, and while it was admired in France, it got largely negative reviews in the United States.
In 1960, Mr. Styron returned home in his imagination by undertaking a project he had contemplated since his youth: a fictional account of an actual violent rebellion led by the slave Nat Turner that occurred in 1831 not too far from where Mr. Styron grew up.
The timing of the book was superb, appearing in 1967 on the crest of the civil rights movement. Mr. Styron prepared for it by immersing himself in the literature of slavery.
The reaction to “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” for which Mr. Styron won the Pulitzer, was at first enthusiastic. Reviewers were sympathetic to Mr. Styron's right to inhabit his subject's mind, to speak in a version of Nat Turner's voice and to weave a fiction around the few facts known about the uprising.
The book sold well all over the world, but then influential black readers in particular began to question the novel's merits, and Hollywood, reacting to the furor, decided against making a movie version. Mr. Styron was accused of having misunderstood black language, religion and psychology, and of having produced a “whitened appropriation of our history.”
Mr. Styron later wrote “Sophie's Choice,” a novel about a fictional Polish Catholic, Sophie Zawistowska, who struggles to survive the aftermath of her internment in Auschwitz.
Again Mr. Styron read extensively, beginning with Olga Lengyel's memoir of her family's internment in Auschwitz, “Five Chimneys,” which had haunted him for decades. Hannah Arendt's “Eichmann in Jerusalem” suggested the central plot development. After reading the memoirs of Rudolf Hoess, the actual commandant of Auschwitz, Mr. Styron made him a character in the novel.
In 1953, Mr. Styron married Rose Burgunder, who survives him. Besides Alexandra Styron, of Brooklyn, Mr. Styron is also survived by two other daughters, Susanna Styron, of Nyack, N.Y., and Paola Styron, of Sherman, Conn.; a son, Thomas, of New Haven; and eight grandchildren.
