Word: nat
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Will the Real Nat Turner Please Stand...
WILLIAM STYRON'S NAT TURNER: TEN BLACK WRITERS RESPOND. Edited by John Henrik Clarke. 120 pages. Beacon Press...
...Confessions of Nat Turner, William Styron's novel about the 1831 slave uprising in Virginia, won the Pulitzer Prize, has sold over 175,000 copies so far, and is still comfortably at home on the bestseller lists. On this evidence alone, the book would seem to deserve at least respectful attention; indeed, it seems to have been the right novel at the right time. But, peculiarly, Nat Turner has provoked an astonishing amount of wrath from black militants, as well as a nasty exchange in The Nation between Styron and Communist Theoretician and Historian Herbert Aptheker, who claims that...
...even if historically true, border on irrelevancy. The essayists, led by John Henrik Clarke, an editor of the militant Negro magazine Freedomways, repeat the same points endlessly and separately, but this does not necessarily validate them. Nor does a reprinting of the full text of the original confessions of Nat Turner seem in any way to enhance their position...
Indeed, the most telling and effective blows unleashed against Styron's Nat Turner are those leveled in terms of literature, not history. Novelist John Williams (The Man Who Cried I Am) criticizes Styron for offering too many characterizations based on traditional Southern regional cardboard stock. Mike Thelwell, a teacher at the University of Massachusetts, reasonably suggests that black slaves developed two languages, "one for themselves and another for white masters," and that Styron has captured neither. Thelwell argues that the more public form is the familiar dialect found in the works of Southern-dialect humorists. The other, "the real language...