William Styron

William Styron (1925-2006), an author who I feel is one of the American greats, though not appreciated enough, is coming out with a new collection of short stories in a couple weeks called The Suicide Run: Five Tales of the Marine Corps. A book called Letters to my Father, a collection of letters Styron wrote to his father, which also includes a few early stories, came out last month. I should take this opportunity then, to draw some attention to his work, featured extensively in the Snell Fiction collections, and in particular his forthcoming work. Styron died three years ago. He published precious few books in his lifetime, and his most popular book may in fact be a memoir he wrote about suffering from severe depression in the mid-1980’s; Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness. But I suppose everybody has at least heard of Sophie’s Choice, and knows they should read it. He did not publish any books for the last thirteen years of his life, but in 2008, there came a collection of essays called Havanas in Camelot: Personal Essays. Then came Letters from My Father and on October 6th comes The Suicide Run. It apppears that the publishing industry is milking Styron for all he’s worth in the years following his death, and he hasn’t exactly been worth as much as J.K Rowling or Stephen King, or even the recently deceased John Updike, for quite some time. But I would argue he is a better writer than any of them, and his explorations of American History, interwoven with personal memory and characterized by lengthy, Faulkner-esque sentences, are more stylistically unique than many of the other writers of his generation. That generation was the post-war generation of American writers, including Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut and James Jones. All of their writing was profoundly influenced by the greats of the past–Hemingway and Faulkner, for example– and colored by wartime experiences. It comes as no surprise, then, that the stories in The Suicide Run are all stories based on Styron’s experiences in the Marine Corps. The one I have read, ‘Rat Beach’, was published for the first time in The New Yorker this past summer. It is reminiscent of Sophie’s Choice in it’s narration, from the point of view of a young soldier. Apparently, Styron was working on a war novel in the last years of his life which was never completed, and the protagonist of the novel was to be the same protagonist of Sophie’s Choice. Several of the completed sections of that novel are included here, and I wonder if ‘Rat Beach’ is one of those sections. But these stories span a period of almost fifty years in terms of composition date, so it could be from almost any time. In any case, I am looking forward to reading the remainder of the stories, though I would hesitate to recommend this book to someone who wants to be introduced to William Styron. In that case, start perhaps with Sophie’s Choice, or perhaps The Confessions of Nat Turner. In any case, don’t you dare miss out on this American heavyweight, who seems to be slowly slipping from literary memory.