Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Quinn is surprisingly effective at making Conchis a cross between Picasso and a monkey, as he was in the novel. In a part that calls for relentless coyness, Candice Bergen cannot be said to act, but her beauty is so compelling that the male audience, like Orpheus, can hardly be blamed for forsaking the future for a backward glance...
...point must be clearly made before a valid consideration of this novel can be undertaken. Today a novel on any phase of the black revolution is de facto propaganda and allegory, whatever the author's disposition toward his subject matter may be. In consequence, aesthetic considerations must take second place to the social and political ones in criticizing such a book. With artistic considerations aside, Mr. Styron's novel is little more than an attempt to demean Nat Turner and the black people. The book fails to make good its claim to historical veracity and perpetuates a large number...
Basically, this book is simply the author's personal opinions, prejudices, and fantasies about black people. The hero is the ubiquitous white anti-hero of the present-day novel with the predictable gamut of problems--e.g., homosexual tendencies, a childhood of unhappiness, and adult life dominated by self-doubts and self-hatred...
This is a very basic insult. The skeleton of the true Turner, a black man, can be clearly discerned in the original confessions. That Styron made no attempt to include a portion of Turner's own viewpoint in the novel's hero is nothing less than a denial of Turner's basic worth and separate personality. It is to say that he is not fit to appear, even marginally, in the novel that bears his name...
...purpose of destroying the novel's pretensions to literary or social merit, ten black writers have written criticisms in William Styron's Nat Turner, Ten Black Writers Respond (Beacon Press, $1.95). All of the criticisms are worth reading closely, the most incisive being those by Lerone Bennett, Vincent Harding and Mike Thelwell. The writers are thorough going and competent; among them they do a far more definitive delineation of the book's absurdities and fabrications than I have done here. I recommend them to your attention...