In 1942, despite an indifferent academic record, Styron went to Davidson College in North Carolina, where good ol' boys flourished. In 1940 he was sent to a threadbare Episcopal boarding school, where there was compulsory daily chapel. When his father remarried, Styron's stepmother seemed to have a particular gift in making his life a hell. In 1939 his mother died of cancer, beginning a period of deepening unhappiness and confused rebellion against his father. Styron was a good ol' boy, elected manager of his high school football team, and class president during his sophomore year. During his childhood he knew no blacks other than the family's servants. Blacks were excluded from the schools, restaurants and public facilities which were patronised by whites.
Styron was raised in a completely segregated world. His father, also a William Styron, worked as an engineer in the large Newport News and Dry Dock Company, and his mother was an accomplished musician who worked as a music supervisor in public schools. His grandfather served in the Confederate army his grandmother's family were wealthy planters and slave holders. The Styrons were a family of struggling merchants, steamboat captains, shipbuilders and tobacco manufacturers from the Tidewater region of Virginia.
That he chose such a subject was audacious in the strained racial climate of the 1960s. Someone like Styron, raised in the heart of segregated Virginia, was not an obvious candidate to enter into the emotions and mind of the black slave, Nat Turner, who in 1831 led the bloodiest "servile insurrection" in the history of the South. The Confessions of Nat Turner became an overnight bestseller, making Styron a wealthy man and winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1968. Although liberals rallied to Styron's defence, as did his close friend, the influential black novelist James Baldwin, the controversy, and the breakdown of communication between white liberals and black activists which it revealed, left Styron dismayed. He received threatening phone calls and letters. In the eyes of his critics that made him guilty on all counts. Styron, who has died aged 81, was a white Southerner and a combative liberal. With the publication of William Styron's novel The Confessions of Nat Turner in 1967, American black activists declared open season on the author.
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