“Styron’s most impressive performance. . . . Belongs on that small shelf reserved for American masterpieces.” —Washington Post Book WorldWinner of the 1980 National Book Award, Sophie’s Choice is William Styron’s classic novel of love, survival, and regret, set in Brooklyn in the wake of the Second World War. The novel centers on three characters: Stingo, a sexually frustrated aspiring novelist; Nathan, his charismatic but violent Jewish neighbor;...

The New York Times– bestselling memoir of crippling depression and the struggle for recovery by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Sophie's Choice .In the summer of 1985, William Styron became numbed by disaffection, apathy, and despair, unable to speak or walk while caught in the grip of advanced depression. His struggle with the disease culminated in a wave of obsession that...

Four novels—including the Pulitzer Prize winner The Confessions of Nat Turner and the National Book Award winner Sophie's Choice —by the great American writer.Lie Down in Darkness is William Styron's stunning debut: a classic portrait of one Southern family's tragic spiral into destruction. Set This House on Fire is a story of evil and redemption involving thr...

The "magnificent" Pulitzer Prize–winning and #1 New York Times –bestselling novel about the preacher who led America's bloodiest slave revolt ( The New York Times ).The Confessions of Nat Turner is William Styron's complex and richly drawn imagining of Nat Turner, the leader of the 1831 slave rebellion in Virginia that led to the deaths of almost sixty men, women, and ch...

The Suicide Run collects five of William Styron’s meticulously rendered narratives based on his real-life experiences as a U.S. Marine. In “Blankenship,” Styron draws on his stint as a guard at a stateside military prison at the end of World War II. “Marriott, the Marine” and “The Suicide Run”—which Styron composed as part of an intended novel that he set aside to write Sophie’s Choice—depict the surreal experience of being conscripted a second time, after World War II, to...

William Styron’s stunning debut: a classic portrait of one Southern family’s tragic spiral into destructionFirst published to wide critical acclaim in 1951, Lie Down in Darkness centers on the Loftis family—Milton and Helen and their daughters, Peyton and Maudie. The story, told through a series of flashbacks on the day of Peyton’s funeral, is a powerful depiction of a family doomed by its failure to forget and its inability to love.Written in mast...

In 1950, at the age of twenty-four, William Clark Styron, Jr., wrote to his mentor, Professor William Blackburn of Duke University. The young writer was struggling with his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness, and he was nervous about whether his “strain and toil” would amount to anything. “When I mature and broaden,” Styron told Blackburn, “I expect to use the language on as exalted and elevated a level as I can sustain. I believe that a writer should accommodate language to his ow...

A vital, illuminating collection of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner’s elegant, passionately engaged nonfictionMy Generation is the definitive gathering of William Styron’s nonfiction, exposing the core of this greatly gifted, highly convivial, and profoundly serious artist from his literary emergence in the 1950s to his death in 2006.Here are fifty years of Styron’s essays, memoirs, reviews, op-eds, articles, eulogies, and speeche...

From the National Book Award–winning and New York Times– bestselling author of Sophie's Choice : three novellas of a young writer's journey to adulthood.In Love Day, twenty-year-old Paul Whitehurst is a Marine lieutenant during World War II, waiting to land on Okinawa, wrestling with anxiety and memories of his boyhood in Virginia.In Shadrach, ten-year-...

From the National Book Award–winning author of Sophie's Choice a novel about two marines who rebel during a punishing long march in the southern heat.In the shadow of the Korean War, a series of misfired mortar shells kill six men in a marine camp during a training exercise, prompting the commanding officer to order a grueling punishment: a thirty-six mile march through the suffocating heat of the Carolina summer. Intend...

"Thoughtful, candid" essays from the National Book Award–winning and #1 New York Times –bestselling author of Sophie's Choice ( The Christian Science Monitor ).This Quiet Dust is a compilation of William Styron's nonfiction writings that confront significant moral questions with precision and vigor. He examines topics as diver...

"One of the finest novels of our times," a New York Times bestseller about a murder in Italy from the National Book Award–winning author of Sophie's Choice ( San Francisco Chronicle ).Shortly after World War II, in the village of Sambuco, Italy, two American men—Peter Leverett and Cass Kinsolving—crossed paths with Mason Flagg. They b...