The career of William Styron (1925–2006) was highlighted by a quartet of long, ambitious, and widely praised novels, including the sensational debut Lie Down in Darkness (1951) and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Confessions of Nat Turner (1967). It would be fair to assume, on the basis of such a record, that Styron’s legacy is built on his fiction.
Yet, nine years after his death, our sense of his accomplishments has grown murky. Posthumous books have come fast and furious, but few have emphasized the main current of his work—that is, as a novelist and short story writer. Instead, Styron’s heirs have brought out a selection of personal essays (2008’s Havanas in Camelot), a compilation of his correspondence (2012’s Selected Letters), and now My Generation, a gargantuan assemblage of essays and reviews of all kinds. (The sole exception is 2009’s The Suicide Run: Five Tales of the Marine Corps.)
This attempt to recast Styron as a writer of nonfiction is not entirely unexpected. 1979 marked the last year in which Styron published a novel (Sophie’s Choice)—and this from an author who had, until then, produced a new novel about once a decade. Instead, Styron looked inward for inspiration—and, in at least one instance, his self-reflection paid off mightily. Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990) concerned Styron’s mid-1980s tussle with depression, using lean, clean prose to mirror the desolation that plagued the author. In a typically tough passage, Styron writes of the illness’s
