Word: turner
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Like Nat Turner, Styron grew up in the Tidewater country, and Turner's story preoccupied him long before he began work on the book. From the time he studied writing at Duke University, through tentative years as a part-time manuscript reader for a New York publisher, Styron kept turning back to Nat. "The melodramatic side attracted me first," he says, "which is why I waited. If I had written it as a younger man, it really would have been gothic...
...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...
...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...
This one revolt, led by Nat Turner in 1831, was at that time considered an aberration; it inconveniently disturbed an accepted notion of the slave system: that slavery, although morally wrong, was used with such charity, benevolence, and restraint that an organized, bloodthirsty insurrection was inthinkable. Nat Turner proved otherwise. The psychological and physical oppression of slavery was supposed to make organized revolt impossible, and the system was doubtlessly emasculating upon most slaves. Nat's revolt stood as a momentous threat to the slave society's security...