Sophie's Choice: William Styron's Novel of Choices, Hobson's and OtherwiseThis novel was chosen by members of On the Southern Literary Trail as a group read for September, 2014. Sophie's Choice, First Ed., First Prtg., William Styron, Random House, New York, New York, 1979 The gate to Ausc...
3 – 3.5 starsIs there anything worse than feeling like you can’t control your own mind? Can you conceive the helplessness of being able to perceive the lies that your own brain is telling you, but still being unable to escape them? In feeling unequal to the task of avoiding triggers that send you...
What an awful, awful family.Lie Down in Darkness is William Styron's first novel. It provides an exhaustive (and exhausting) portrait of a world-beating dysfunctional family. Milton Loftis, a middle-aged lawyer who has missed out on his youthful fantasies of parlaying his military background and ...
This book was published in 1967. It was at the time of black power and the civil rights movement. The book was a big hit and won the Pulitzer Prize and then ran into the headwinds of controversy. I had forgotten that in the many years that passed. How could this rich, white, southern man write ab...
Many people say they are going to write a novel. Most of us never get around to it. Some teeter on the edge but then, somehow, still don’t get around to it. A few of us, like me, are pushed. I was “pushed” by William Styron. Strange for an Australian to say but it’s true. Sophie’s Choice blew my ...
I read this as part of my Big Fat Reading Project and also because ever since I read Sophie's Choice so many years ago and had my mind completely rearranged, I vowed to read all of Styron's novels. In a way, it's a good thing he didn't write too many because each one is such a heavy dose of human...
The Long March is one of William Styron’s masterpieces. It is a perfect indictment of the psychological impact of the military on people. Mannix, a Marine captain, sets himself in a training exercise against his superior officer, Colonel Templeton. Mannix believes that Templeton’s motives are pun...
The heart of this book is 100 pages of transcript of conversations between an 18 year and cops trying to coerce him into admitting he murdered his mother. And with every question and answer the injustice gets deeper and deeper leaving you shaking the booking yelling, “Lawyer Up you dumb schmuck!”...
Despite my aversion to military things, there are aspects of the life that I have found tolerable—fascinating even, though inferior to chess or Scarlatti. Take mortars, for example. Although I was born with, I’m sure, less than average manual dexterity, the use of mortars in the field—and my abil...
The harrowing episodes I experienced during my period of grave depression eight years ago were so numerous that I could not possibly have recorded them all in Darkness Visible. But if I were revising the book, I would include my memory of an excruciating evening a week or so before my suicidal im...
Styron probably submitted “Where the Spirit Is,” eventually published in the January 1944 issue of the magazine. † Elizabeth Buxton (1900–69) married William C. Styron in October 1941, becoming Styron’s stepmother. ‡ The original stage production of Arsenic and Old Lace by Joseph Kesselring. Watc...