Word: styron
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...WILLIAM STYRON came to Winthrop House the evening of the bust. He said he had spent the whole day traveling, he had only heard radio news summaries, he wanted to know what was happening on campus. Nevertheless, the conversation turned almost immediately to The Confessions of Nat Turner, and it stayed there until Styron left...
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...
...Styron wishes to maintain such a web of fabrications and fantasy, it is no more than his own personal problem and more susceptible to pity than censure...
...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...
Though the ten writers form the vanguard of Styron's critics, he has some rather imposing figures among his supporters, including, for example, Michael Harrington, Eugene Genovese and Norman Podhoretz. In the debate that has developed, several indicative themes occur constantly: What was Turner really like, and who shaped him more, white people or black? What were his motives? Just how bad was slavery, really, and just how much of a people were black people...