William Styron, best known for novels such as SOPHIE’S CHOICE and THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER, died yesterday at his home in Martha’s Vineyard. The cause was pneumonia, coming after many years of illness, his daughter Alexandra Styron said. The New York Times obit has lots more about Styron’s early success and longtime career as a writer.
“I think for years to come his work will be seen for its unique power,” Norman Mailer said of Styron in a telephone interview. “No other American writer of my generation has had so omnipresent and exquisite a sense of the elegiac. That is no mean virtue in these years of oxymoronic uproar.”
For more on Styron, see his PBS “American Masters” page, an interview with Humanities magazine in 1997, and his contributions to the New York Review of Books.