Word: styron
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...mingles with writing that is just plain rough. "Every white throat cut is a success in itself," was one writer's contribution to racial amity. Digest was one of the first publications to take exception to The Confessions of Nat Turner on the ground that White Novelist William Styron was incapable of putting himself inside the skin of a 19th century Negro slave. More effective was a satire apparently written in answer to it. Just as Styron placed himself in the position of Turner, so did pseudonymous Author F. Tuy Holrel write in the first person about George Washington...
...glad that the ten black writers who responded to William Styron's Nat Turner [July 12] weren't around when Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin. If this novel had been repressed because of stock characters and a failure to understand the Negro character, I don't know what would have happened to the abolition movement...
...submit that the "important question" is not, as you would have it, "What is Styron's own attitude on racial questions?" Unless we are prepared to return to the Harriet Beecher Stowe school of social axe grinding, we had best leave off speculating on authorial politics and simply judge novels as good...
...identifying Styron's personal opinions as the most crucial aspect of the controversy, you partially fall into the same trap as those black critics who denounce Nat Turner from nonesthetic, and therefore shaky, platforms...
...important question to ask is: What is Styron's own attitude on ra- cial questions? The Confessions of Nat Turner is a clear enough reply. Styron obviously believes in a darkly militant way that any brutish black uprising is the inevitable result of white persecution. The effect of both, the persecution and the uprising, adds up to tragedy...