Describing a doctoral thesis on Sophie’s Choice: “There was a footnote, which I swear to you said, ‘Where the movie is obscure I will refer to William Styron's novel for clarification.’”

On when he writes: “I like to stay up late at night and get drunk and sleep late. The afternoon is the only time I have left. ”

In the fall of 1985, the writer William Styron fell into a deep depression. The author of celebrated novels such as The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) and Sophie’s Choice (1979), he ceased writing that autumn and entered a period of intense brooding and near-suicidal despair. He was admitted to the neurological unit of Yale–New Haven Hospital on December 14 and stayed there for almost seven weeks. Rest and treatment allowed him to regain his equilibrium; he returned to his home in Roxbury, Connecticut, in early February, and by that summer was writing again.

Captain Hipp and his background made me ever more fascinated by a theory I had often played with. Which was: you didn’t have to be a Southerner to be a good marine, but it certainly did no harm.

 The following is an excerpt from a novel entitled The Confessions of Nat Turner, based on the life of the leader of the only effective, sustained revolt in the annals of American Negro slavery.

 

It all came about like this. Poppy, whose religious activity had been intense all through the Lenten season (at times Cass had thought that if she brought one more fish into the house he would throttle her), reached a kind of peak of fervour during Holy Week; unremittingly, she had addressed herself to all sorts of complicated rites and offices, in pouring rain dashing out to see the various Stations—whatever that meant—and it was at one of these, Cass knew not where—at the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, perhaps, or that other one, with the Giotto fresco, San Giovanni in Laterano—that she encountered an American couple, the McCabes.

The Paris Review could have been named Weathercock—and other early memories from an editor emeritus.A new collection of William Styron’s nonfiction, My Generation, includes this reminiscence on the origins of The Paris Review; this piece first appear…

To George Plimpton December 1, 1953 Ravello, Italy Dear George: Herewith the interview, revised and expanded. I think that in the future it might be a good idea for you to get a tape-recorder for these darn things, because it’s a bitch of a j…

To George Plimpton September 18, 1953 Ravello, Italy Dear George: Last night I did something which I only do once or twice in a generation: I stayed up all night with a bottle of Schenley’s and watched the dawn. That sort of thing is a pervers…

To Norman Mailer June 1, 1953 Rome, Italy Dear Norman: I note that you began your last letter: “I’ve been kind of depressed lately,” and by way of preface to this letter I should say that I’ve been both depressed and elated since you last …

To John P. Marquand, Jr. April 17, 1953 Rome, Italy Dear Jack: I received your telegram, and I must say that Rose and I feel that there would be nothing more delightful than to play Byron with you for a while, and we were especially intrigued by t…

“A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end,” explained William Styron in his 1954 Art of Fiction interview. “You live several lives while reading it. Its writer should, too.” Such is the experien…

One of my oddest trips in a lifetime of odd trips was one that I took with Terry Southern across the U.S.A. in 1964. At that time I’d known Terry (whom I also called, depending on mood and circumstance, “Tex” or “T”) ever since 1952 during a long sojourn in Paris. Like a patient in lengthy convalescence, the city was still war weary, with its beauty a little drab around the edges. 

Rose’s and my wedding at the Campidoglio in 1953. The dour man to my left is the Mayor of Rome. Like the captain of a ship, he has the power invested in him to marry.

The Paris Review Eagle, or “the bird” as it was referred to, was designed by William Pène du Bois, the magazine’s art editor, in the spring of 1952. The symbolism is not difficult: an American eagle is carrying a pen: the French association is denoted by the helmet the bird is wearing—actually a Phrygian hat originally given a slave on his freedom in ancient times and which subsequently became the liberty cap or bonnet rouge worn by the French Revolutionists of the 19th Century. 

Dear—:

The preface which you all wanted me to write, and which I wanted to write, and finally wrote, came back to me from Paris today so marvelously changed and re-worded that it seemed hardly mine. Actually, you know, it shouldn’t be mine.