Word: turner
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...intriguing to note that, in his entire adult life, Styron's hero performed only two creative acts; the first was to plan the revolt, the second was to build a flush toilet for whites. The relationship between this Turner and the man who spoke the above words would be interesting to establish...
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...
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...
...mentioned above, Nat Turner is a figure of great symbolic significance in the present struggle for black freedom. To write about him and his revolt now, in present-day America, is to write propaganda and allegory. It is to make a de facto attempt to influence the thinking of contempory blacks and whites on a vital segment of black history and thus influence the final outcome of the present struggle...