William Styron

Styron grew up in Newport News, Virginia, served in the Marine Corps in the final stretch of the Second World War and again during the Korean War without seeing combat either time, and studied at Duke University before Lie Down in Darkness, his 1951 debut, announced a major new Southern voice.

The Confessions of Nat Turner, a fictionalized first-person account of the leader of an 1831 Virginia slave rebellion, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1967 but ignited a fierce backlash, with a group of Black writers and critics publishing a book-length rebuttal attacking a white novelist's claim to Turner's interior voice. Sophie's Choice, drawn partly from a real Auschwitz survivor he had known, followed twelve years later to wide acclaim.

Severe clinical depression overtook him in his sixties, and his 1990 memoir Darkness Visible became one of the most influential accounts of the illness ever published by a major writer; he died in 2006.