William Clark Styron Jr. (June 11, 1925 – November 1, 2006) was an American novelist and essayist who won major literary awards for his work.

[1] His birthplace was less than a hundred miles from the site of Nat Turner's slave rebellion, the inspiration for Styron's most famous and controversial novel.

Styron's mother was from the North while his father was a Southern liberal, laying out broad racial perspectives in the household.

There he published his first fiction, a short story heavily influenced by William Faulkner, in an anthology of student work [citation needed].

[5] Though Styron was made a lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps, the Japanese surrendered before his ship left San Francisco.

However, he was to transform his experience at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina into his short novel, The Long March, published serially the following year.

At the American Academy, he renewed an acquaintance with a young Baltimore poet, Rose Burgunder, to whom he had been introduced the previous fall at Johns Hopkins University.

Some of Styron's experiences during this period inspired his third published book Set This House on Fire (1960), a novel about intellectual American expatriates on the Amalfi coast of Italy.

The novel received mixed reviews in the United States, although its publisher considered it successful in terms of sales.

The historian and critic John Henrik Clarke edited and contributed to a polemical anthology, William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond, published in 1968 by Beacon Press.

Despite the controversy, the novel was a runaway critical and financial success, and won both the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction[8] and the William Dean Howells Medal in 1970.

In the early 1960s, Styron became a mentor to prisoner Benjamin Reid, who in 1957 had beaten a woman to death with a hammer in a botched robbery attempt.

The memoir's goals included increasing knowledge and decreasing stigmatization of major depressive disorders and suicide.

Styron noted in an article for Vanity Fair thatthe pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne.

Through the healing process of time—and through medical intervention or hospitalization in many cases—most people survive depression, which may be its only blessing; but to the tragic legion who are compelled to destroy themselves there should be no more reproof attached than to the victims of terminal cancer.

Other works published during his lifetime include the play In the Clap Shack (1973), and a collection of his nonfiction, This Quiet Dust (1982).

French president François Mitterrand invited Styron to his first Presidential inauguration, and later made him a Commander of the Legion of Honor.

The Port Warwick neighborhood of Newport News, Virginia, was named after the fictional city in Styron's Lie Down in Darkness.

Once he recovered from his illness, Styron was able to write the memoir Darkness Visible (1990), the work for which he became best known during the last two decades of his life.

While doing a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, Styron renewed a passing acquaintance with young Baltimore poet Rose Burgunder.