the confessions of nat turner by william styron

a psychopathic monster” rather than expand on the historical record, he chose to write a meditation on history, giving him “dimensions of humanity that were almost totally absent in the documentary evidence.” In the novel, Turner is a young slave brought up as a domestic servant in the household of a wealthy, altruistic plantation owner who decides to teach Turner to read as proof that slaves are capable of “cultivation.” In Styron’s depiction, Turner is pious, even saintly, with no romantic entanglements other than a chaste attachment to a young white woman who secretly holds abolitionist views.

Styron wrote that the Turner he found in Gray’s text was a “dangerous religious lunatic. “The Confessions of Nat Turner” is based, very loosely, on a “confession” Turner gave to his court-appointed lawyer, Thomas Gray, shortly before his execution. Later in life (Styron died in 2006) he recalled traveling to a historically black college to receive an honorary degree shortly after “The Confessions” was published: “I felt gratitude at their acceptance of me,” he wrote, “and, somehow more important, at my acceptance of them, as if my literary labors and my plunge into history had helped dissolve many of my preconceptions about race that had been my birthright as a Southerner.”Īmid the upheavals of the spring and summer of 1968 - Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in April, Robert Kennedy’s in June, rioting in American cities, the disastrous Democratic convention in Chicago - Beacon Press published a slim volume of essays called “William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond.” Almost overnight, “The Confessions” became the center of a debate that has helped shape American literature ever since. Best of all, Styron said, was the response from many African-Americans. “The Confessions” got excellent reviews, appeared on the best-seller list, was sold to 20th Century Fox and won a Pulitzer Prize. It was a risky, even provocative book - he’d always known it would be - but the gamble appeared to have paid off. After six years of intense work, he had published, the previous fall, the novel he thought would cement his reputation: “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” an account of an 1831 slave revolt in Southampton County, Va., narrated in Turner’s voice. Nineteen sixty-eight began as a promising year for William Styron.

The confessions of nat turner by william styron