It’s the birthday of acclaimed author William Styron (1925-2006), whose award-winning novels often stirred controversy and who is probably best known for his final novel, Sophie’s Choice (1979).

Styron was born in Newport News, Virginia, an only child; his mother suffered from metastatic breast cancer for years before dying when Styron was 14. As his daughter wrote in 2007, “No one encouraged him to mourn her” (Alexandra Styron, “Reading My Father,” The New Yorker, Dec. 10, 2007). (Pro tip: not mourning the death of your mother is never a good idea. You’re just delaying the inevitable.) He studied at Davidson College, then Duke University, all while enrolled in the Marines’ reserve officer training program. His active duty began in 1944 and he was assigned to the invasion of Japan but never saw combat due to the dropping of the atomic bombs. He returned to Duke and graduated in 1947.

Styron spent some time in Paris and palled around with the sort of people who would do something like found The Paris Review, which is exactly what they did. By now he had written his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness (1951), about a young woman who commits suicide, a topic he returned to often and—spoiler alert—struggled with personally when he was older. In 1953 he married poet Rose Burgunder, with whom he eventually had four children; the family lived in a Connecticut farmhouse where he focused on writing and his wife did absolutely everything else, including raising the children. After his next two novels, he wrote the one that provoked the greatest controversy, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), based on a slave rebellion in 1831. While the book was a huge commercial success and won the Pulitzer in 1968, many critics felt that this white author had appropriated and misrepresented African American history. Styron was defended by James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, but a number of other black authors published William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond (1968).

Sophie’s Choice was then controversial for focusing on a non-Jewish victim of the Holocaust. (It was also wildly racy.) Again, Styron’s book was successful in spite of the controversy and won a National Book Award in 1980. Meryl Streep, who, it is widely acknowledged, can do no wrong, portrayed Sophie in the movie version (1982) and won Best Actress. While that was Styron’s final novel, he wrote a book in 1990, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, about a severe bout with depression after 60 that landed him in the hospital. The book sought to shed light on the taboo topics of depression and suicide. Styron recovered to some degree for the next 15 years—his daughter credits the dedicated Rose as being the main reason he survived—but eventually experienced excruciating relapses at 75. He died at 81 of pneumonia.

The article by the daughter is well worth reading, so here’s the link.

Have a Monday full of light and warmth and stay scrupulously honest to the data.