Word: styron
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...told, Nat Turner was five years in the writing. Styron worked in a small studio at his 13-acre estate in Roxbury, Conn., where he lives with his wife and four children. While the book was in progress, Negro Author James Baldwin paid him a five-month visit, and Styron acknowledges that "some of Jimmy's fiery, passionate intellect may have rubbed...
Mighty Theme. Styron's passions seem to be confined largely to the printed page. The darker emotions-fury, despair, guilt-pour through all of his works, but Styron himself projects the reserved, slightly courtly manner of the storybook Virginian. It is a coincidence that his book should come on the heels of the summer riots. While Styron does not condone the violence, he views it through a chilling perspective sharpened by his five years with Nat Turner. The Negro extremist, says Styron, "is purifying himself by violence of a sense of his own abject self-ratedness...
...undoubted success of Nat Turner, Styron feels that he has discharged an obligation. "Melville said that for a mighty book you must have a mighty theme. I hesitate to quote that because it sounds pretentious, but my theme was god-sent...
...WILLIAM STYRON shares the belief of his good friend James Baldwin that white men create their own Negroes. Like any Southerner, Styron has heard the same myth a thousand times: how people up North just don't know the Negro like we do down here, how we have had wonderful relationships with the family Negroes for over 20 years, and how we both prefer social distance from each other. Styron also knows that the Southern racial stigma is based more on a lack of contact than on friction or closeness. There still exists a deeply feared law of apartheid...
...Styron's upbringing on matters of race was normal for a Southern boy. He was taught to call a Negro female a "woman" instead of a "lady." He was forbidden to use the word "nigger." He was pained by the sight of extreme Negro poverty, while he took school segregation as an ordinary fact of life...