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William Styron was born in June of 1925 in Newport News, Virginia. His father suffered from depression and his mother died when he was thirteen.  Following his mother’s death, Styron was sent to a boys’ preparatory.  He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree at Duke University (NC), then enlisted in the Marine Corps, where he served during World War II.

After leaving the service, he moved to New York worked McGraw-Hill Publishing and took classes with Hiram Haydn at the New School for Social Research. With guidance and encouragement from Haydn, Styron published his debut novel,  Lie Down in Darkness in 1951 at the age of twenty-six.  This novel launched his career and earned him the AmericanAcademy’s Prix de Rome.  In 1953 he married and together he and Rose had four children.

Six years later he published his second novel The Long March, then went on to write Set This House on Fire and one of his most famous novels,  The Confessions of Nat Turner, which earned him the Pulitzer Prize in 1968. Styron did not publish again for eleven years, but Sophie’s Choice, published in 1979, was well worth the wait.

The same year as the movie Sophie’s Choice appeared, Styron produced a book of essays entitled The Quiet Dust and Other Writings. In 1990 he published Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness. Throughout the 1990s, Styron continued to write, publish, edit, and receive awards for his contributions to American literature. Among his works in the 1990’s is  A Tidewater Morning: Three Tales from Youth (1993) and Fathers and Daughters: In Their own Words, published with Mariana Ruth Cook.

Styron’s greatest artistic interest has always been substantive.  He holds that “Language, character, and narrative are interconnected in an almost an inseparable way. The three are a trinity…a great book should leave you slightly exhausted at the end.”

In the summer of 1985, Styron was struck by an illness once called melancholia, but today referred to as clinical depression. Having trudged “upward out of hell’s black depths,” Styron has been able to record his devastating descent into depression into his work.

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William Styron and his wife Rose have four children — three daughters and a son.

The couple has lived in the same house in Roxbury, Connecticut, for over thirty years.