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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 and then enlisted in the Marine Corps, in which 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; he and his wife Rose had four children.
Six years later he published his second novel, The Long March, and then went on to write Set This House on Fire and The Confessions of Nat Turner, which earned him the Pulitzer Prize in 1968. Styron did not publish again for eleven years, when he came out with Sophie’s Choice.
Styron has remarked, “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, he was struck by melancholia. Having trudged “upward out of hell’s black depths,” he has been able to incorporate his descent into depression into his work.
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.
