“The late insurrection in Southampton has greatly excited the public mind and led to a thousand idle, exaggerated and mischievous reports…” -Thomas R. Gray
A justifiably controversial Pulitzer Prize-winner, William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner was initially a bestseller. It received mainly favorably reviews from the likes of The New York Times Book Review and The New Republic, and it even entertained a bidding war over publishing rights from Life and Harper’s over which magazine would get to feature chapter excerpts from the book. And if that’s not enough, The Confessions of Nat Turner also secured a coveted film deal with 20th Century Fox before earning a Pulitzer Prize along with the William Dean Howells Medal. But in the ensuing years The Confessions of Nat Turner has since faced considerable scrutiny and garnered heavy criticism from a variety of reviewers, pundits, writers, and academics. Considering simply the optics alone, the decision for William Styron –the grandson of slave-owners– to publish a historically embellished first-person, proto-modernist memoir-styled account of the bloodiest slave revolt in American history was certainly a disquieting decision for some, and for others, it portended a shocking and distressing situation. And not only that, but to release the book at the height of the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1960s, amidst a popular wave of anger and protest, was more than enough to cast a pall over this novel, leaving it with the sting of being merely “provocative” rather than a serious work of enduring literature. Critics of The Confessions of Nat Turner have included fellow Pulitzer Prize-winner Alice Walker, C. Eric Lincoln (sociologist), Nikki Giovanni (poet), and others; while its defenders have included James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Eugene D. Genovese (historian), Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and even Bill Clinton (who listed it as one of his favorite books). I discuss more about the firestorm that engulfed The Confessions of Nat Turner further below.
Regardless, throughout my chronological pilgrimage through the Pulitzer-Prize-winning novels, I have always appreciated the opportunity to learn more about uniquely troublesome, puzzling, and even striking works in American literature, and I count William Styron’s novel about Nat Turner’s rebellion as among these important moments. While in the grand scheme I did not particular care for this novel –and was very much glad when the final page permitted me to put it down– the brutal historical event it purports to depict, and the subsequent controversy it inspired, continue to remain of great interest to our national discourse.
About Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion
In August 1831 in a remote region of southeastern Virginia (Southampton County, not far from the border between Virginia and North Carolina), an enslaved Christian preacher named Nat Turner led a several-day brutal massacre against local white slave owners and their families who dwelled on plantations in the surrounding region. Beginning with a small band of slaves, Nat Turner’s rebellion eventually grew into a large brigade of perhaps 60 slaves, gathering new recruits at each plantation. In the end, the assault left nearly sixty white men, women, and children dead before the state militia and federal troops quickly put down the rebellion. What followed was a frenzied rampage against black slaves in Virginia, killing between 36-120 black men, women, and children, while other estimates suggest countless scores of innocent black people were lynched, perhaps as many as 200 or 240 black people. One story recounts a slave working in the field, wholly unaffiliated with the insurrection and unfamiliar with Nat Turner, who was snatched out of the field and promptly executed. Almost immediately, southern states began passing laws prohibiting the education of enslaved or free black people, while restricting other civil liberties, and even mandating that all religious gatherings have white ministers. While most of Nat Turner’s compatriots were slaughtered, he managed to elude capture for the better part of a month, hiding in a makeshift cave protected by a fallen tree covered in fence rails until he was found by a farmer. When asked if he regrets what he had done, he replied, “Was Christ not crucified?” Nat Turner was then taken to the county courthouse in Jerusalem (which was later renamed “Courtland” in 1888) where he was tried, convicted, and hanged. His lifeless body was then skinned to allow observers trophies and purses made of his skin (if you can possibly imagine such a grotesque display of barbarism), and his skeleton and bones were also distributed.
So, who was the real Nat Turner? And what inspired him to lead such a violent rebellion? Perhaps being relegated to the position of mere human property would be sufficient enough cause for understanding Turner’s bloody uprising. For example, on two occasions he requested freedom from his masters, but he was violently whipped for even suggesting such a thing. The brief facts we have about Nat Turners life come down to us from a 6,000-word, 20-page pamphlet written by his court-appointed attorney, Thomas R. Gray, who documented Turner’s confession, and it was later widely published as “The Confessions of Nat Turner.” From it, we are given a terse, slightly opaque account of a very intelligent enslaved man who was nevertheless bought and sold several times, and treated as little more than an animal for much of his life. Turner was an apocalyptic Baptist preacher who –after periodically fasting and praying– claimed he had experienced various feverish dreams and divinely-inspired visions. His ministry gained quite a substantial following of slaves, and also some freemen, as well. The final straw came in 1831 when Nat Turner observed an eclipse which he interpreted as a divine sign from God instructing him to commence a revolt against southern slave-owners and exterminate their seed from the earth. Being well-versed in scripture, Turner viewed himself as a warrior for the Kingdom of God, and he was known among his followers as a “prophet.” He may have had a wife named “Chary” (or perhaps “Cherry”), though she is absent in Styron’s novel. With four of his closest confidants –Henry, Hark, Nelson, and Sam plus Will Francis and Jack Rees—Nat Turner’s massacre began in the dead of night at the home of his owner Joseph Travis. Brandishing medieval weaponry like clubs, swords, and axes, he and his fellow revolutionaries proceeded plantation by plantation in the surrounding region brutally murdering every white, slave-owning family member, including the women and children, hacking them to pieces and decapitating them, leaving no survivors. Curiously, although Nat Turner intended to spell the first blood himself, it was actually Will Francis “The Executioner” who struck the first blow. At one plantation, Lavinia Francis was saved by her slave named “Red,” who protected her, concealing her master in a closet under blankets when Nat Turner’s rebellion showed up at the door and searched the house. The bloodbath concluded at the Rebecca Vaughn House where Rebecca was sliced in two by Will Francis’s axe. And the only person Nat Turner ever confessed to killing was Margaret Whitehouse (which Styron chose to depict in a surprising, eyebrow-raising manner in the novel).
Was Nat Turner a hero? The battle over his legacy has been long and complicated (and ; but he was celebrated by Frederick Douglas and his name often appears as one of the greatest African American figures since the founding of the nation. His revolt was part of a broader practice of resistance against chattel slavery –prior to Nat Turner’s rebellion, there were numerous other slave revolts across states like New York, North Carolina, Virginia, and perhaps most notably in Louisiana. At the time, approximately two out of every five people were owned as property, and within one generation, the Civil War would break out following numerous other uprisings, perhaps most famously John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859. How many forgotten names of slaves died in these rebellions, large and small? How many stories of recalcitrant slaves were never told? The legacy of Nat Turner’s rebellion continues into the present-day. Some of Turner’s associates were decapitated, and at least one of their heads was placed on a pike to rot in the sun on “Blackhead Signpost Road” –the name of the road was only changed to “Signpost Road” in 2021. And rumors of Turner’s surviving skull have turned up from time to time, one of which was returned to Turner’s familial ancestors. It was intended to be tested and verified at the Smithsonian before being given a proper burial. Lastly, Turner’s prized Bible, which he was found clinging to when captured, was given to the Smithsonian Museum, though it is missing his favorite book, the Book of Revelation.
About The Confessions of Nat Turner
Sometimes called “the most controversial book of the decade,” William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner is an imaginative work of American literature that attempts to reach across the silent chasm of history in an effort to make the elusive figure of Nat Turner seem less distant and more familiar. Despite being over four hundred pages long, The Confessions of Nat Turner depicts the last couple days of Nat Turner’s life as he sits inside his jail cell, awaiting death after his sentencing by judge Jeremiah Cobb, an unpleasant infuriating, condescending man. The “Reverend” Nat is interviewed by his attorney, Thomas Gray, and during the dialogue his mind drifts in and out of memories, visions, prayerful scripture. In the adjacent cell sits Nat’s friend and fellow slave, Hercules “Hark” whose “nature was basically humorous, outward-going, beneficent, serene, and he could not long sustain a somber mood, even though many horrible things had happened to him” (41).
Thirty-one-year-old Nat was born as the property of Benjamin Turner, who died when Nat was eight or nine. A miller and dealer in timber, he was killed while felling a cypress tree. Nat was then “passed by bequest” into the possession of Samuel Turner and was owned by Samuel Turner for ten or eleven years –a period he remembers fondly because he became a “house slave” who was allowed to learn to read– until the family fortune declined, and Nat was then sold to Mr. Thomas Moore at the age of twenty-one, a small farmer, for nine years until his death. Mr. Moore died in an accident when his skull broke during the birth of a calf, a silly “misadventure.” Nat then became the property of his Thomas Moore’s son, Putnam, who was fifteen-years-old, however when the late Mr. Moore’s widow, Miss Sarah, remarried a man named Joseph Travis, a childless widower of fifty-five who was desirous of offspring and who lived in the region of Cross Keys. He was an expert wheelwright by trade. At this point, Nat was technically under the full control of Joseph Travis even though Putnam owned Nat by property title –an odd “two-fold property” arrangement that was not uncommon for a slave. Travis was moderately prosperous, but he only owned two slaves (previously he owned seven or eight slaves but his acreage diminished and he sold them all up the Mississippi Delta except one, Hark, who was about a year younger than Nat). Hark was born on a vast tobacco plantation in Sussex County but after “tobacco sucked the soil dry and the land went to rack and ruin”. He was sold at age fifteen to Joseph Travis. Once Nat came under Travis’s control, he grew to “love him [Hark] like a brother.” The other slave was Moses, a husky twelve-year-old boy who was purchased in Richmond, but he became a “nuisance” due to his separation anxiety from his mother –sadly, he was frequently crying and peeing his pants.
Nat Turner could trace his lineage to the Gold Coast in Africa. His grandmother was brought in chains to Yorktown at the age of thirteen, she was stridently anti-slavery, and even wanted to “tear to pieces” his mother when she was born because she didn’t want to bring a child into slavery. She starved herself at age thirteen and died just days after her daughter was born, and was buried in an overgrown graveyard for slaves. Nat Turner’s mother was raised by Alpheus Turner, and his father was a butler in the Turner house who was also named Nathaniel, but he soon fled slavery and Nat never saw him again. His mother, Lou-Ann, lived a hard life –at one point in the novel, Nat secretly watches in horror as she is beaten and raped with a broken bottle to her neck by McBride, a drunkard Irish field overseer of the fields. The weight of this shocking scene is doubled by the suggestion that Lou-Ann is actually enjoying this assault –why was this included in The Confessions of Nat Turner? What does it add to the story? At any rate, Nat’s mother soon dies and he is left alone in the care of the Turners.
All of this is told in incredibly dense detail from Nat’s perspective throughout the novel (Part I Judgment Day, Part II Old Times Past [Voices, Dreams, Recollections], Part III Study War, Part IV “It is done…”). However, Styron takes some extraordinary liberties with the story. Along the way, we learn that Nat has strange recurring dreams and visions, and he has developed a deeply internalized racism toward his fellow black slaves –he compares slaves to flies and elephants and other stultified, bestial analogies. Filled with contempt for black people, he scorns all the poorly educated black slaves, and maintains a certain degree of respect for the Turners as noble slave owners who privately wish to be rid of the institution slavery, wishing instead for machinery to replace human slaves in the future with manual labor. Consider the following passages:
“Because the big house is isolated from mill and field, and because the affairs of house servants transpire as if in a world apart, this privy is one of the few places where my daily life intersects with the lives of those Negroes who already I have come to think of as a lower order of people –a ragtag mob, coarse, raucous, clownish, uncouth. For even now as a child I am contemptuous and aloof, filled with disdain for the black riffraff which dwells beyond the close perimeter of the big house –the faceless and nameless toilers who at daybreak vanish into the depths of the mill or into the fields beyond the woods, returning like shadows at sundown to occupy their cabins like so many chickens gone weary to roost” (136).
And also:
“I became in short a pet, the darling, the little black jewel of Turner’s Mill. Pampered, fondled, nudged, pinched, I was the household’s spoiled child, a grinning elf in a starched jumper who gazed at himself in mirrors, witlessly preoccupied with his own ability to charm. That a white child would not have been so sweetly indulged –that my very blackness was central to the privileges I was given and the familiarity I was allowed—never occurred to me, and doubtless I would not have understood even if I had been told. Small wonder then that from the snug, secure dominion of my ignorance and self-satisfaction I began more and more to regard the Negroes of the mill and field as creatures beneath contempt, so devoid of the attributes I had come to connect with the sheltered and respectable life that they were worth not even my derision. Let some wretched cornfield hand, sweating and stinking, his bare foot gashed by a mishandled hoe, make the blunder of appearing at the edge of the veranda, with a piteous wail asking that I get old massah to please fetch him some kind of ‘portice’ for his wound, and I would direct him to the proper rear door in a voice edged with icy scorn. Or should any black children from the cabins invade, no matter how guilelessly, the precincts, of the big house and its rolling lawn, I would be at them with a flourished broomstick and shrill cries of abuse –safe however behind the kitchen door” (170).
The Confessions of Nat Turner is mercifully not the same story told in another controversial early Pulitzer Prize-winner, Gone with the Wind. With The Confessions of Nat Turner, we are at least given the perspective of an enslaved person –his anger, his passion, his thoughts on being owned as human property. There is at least nuance in this depiction of American slavery, even if it warrants substantiated criticism. However, in what is perhaps the most outrageous bit of historical revisionism in the novel, Styron makes it explicitly clear that Nat Turner is a deeply sexually frustrated young man. Wracked with guilt and facing unbridled lust for white women –first a young woman named Emmeline and later Margaret Whitehead– we are given extensive, graphic descriptions of his wild, burning desire. And amazingly this is conveyed as the chief impetus for the birth of his rebellion. According to this logic, Nat Turner starts his rebellion as a result of being a sexually frustrated fanatic bordering on lunacy. He worships his infatuations from a distance as a frustrated, virginal, young man overcome with a “divine sickness” that forces him to view the object of his desire as either a chaste goddess or a filthy blaspheming whores –defiled but still alluring to him. Here, we are confronted with descriptions of Nat Turner pleasuring himself and a brief, spontaneous homoerotic encounter he has with another boy named Willis. All of this is extremely provocative, entirely fabricated, and it challenges the charity many readers extend to the author for liberal use of creative license.
The climax of the novel occurs when Nat Turner chases down and kills his beloved Margaret Whitehead in an open field:
“As she stumbled thus, then recovered, I heard for the first time her hurtful, ragged breathing, and it was with this sound in my ears that I plunged the sword into her side, just below and behind her breast. She screamed then at last. Litheness, grace, the body’s limp felicity –all fled her like ghosts. She crumpled to earth, limp, a rag, and as she fell I stabbed her again in the same place, or near it, where pulsing blood already encrimsoned the taffeta’s blue. There was no scream this time although the echo of the first sang in my ears like a far angelic cry; when I turned aside from her fallen body I was troubled by a steady soughing noise like the rise and fall of a summer tempest in a grove of pines and realized it was the clamor of my own breathing as it welled up in sobs from my chest” (414).
Aside from his religious fanaticism and sexual frustrations, Nat Turner’s other chief inspiration for his rebellion is described as coming from his growing resentment over his owner, Thomas Moore, who denies him the freedom he was so earnestly promised by his former owner. And this coupled with drought and starvation, as Nat observes dying children and the hideous mistreatment of Hark who had attempted to escape northward before being caught and betrayed by another slave in Maryland. Hark was then returned to Thomas Moore in Virginia where he was pitted in “brutal combat” for entertainment. These are reasons William Styron gives for Nat Turner’s “divine mission to kill all the white people in Southampton, and as far beyond as destiny might take me” wherein each plantation faced “ruthless extermination.” His “inmost four” –Hark, Henry, Nelson, and Sam—were all equally inspired by their hatred of slavery. “So that is how it all began. My little inner group of followers were excited about such a plan when first I outlined it to them. Bedeviled, torn apart by hatred, sick unto death of bondage, they would have cast their lot with the most evil ha’nt or phantom of the woods to be shut forever of the white man’s world. They had nothing more to lose” (335). All of these hazy, dreamlike first-person reflections on Nat Turner’s life conclude back in his prison cell only moments before his death by hanging.
Is The Confessions of Nat Turner a malicious literary appropriation of an important black historical figure? Or was it a justifiable fictional interpretation of a harrowing event? Was it wrong for William Styron to take such strident creative liberties with Nat Turner’s story? Who has the right to publish an American slave narrative? Generally speaking, I find James Baldwin and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. to be more persuasive in their stance on Styron’s contribution to the literary imagination as it pertains to this dark chapter in American history. As is often the case, challenging, controversial books can expose the imaginary boundaries and fissures within our culture. But while I am unmoved by calls for censorship, I find myself still in disbelief at Styron’s decision to portray Nat Turner as essentially a conflicted, sex-obsessed, lusty young man whose internalized racism and sexual frustrations are manifested in his physical desire for a white woman, as well as his urge to kill white people. To what extent is this a caricature of Nat Turner? And in what ways does it degrade the brutal struggle for freedom? In addition to the leading voices who have praised the novel, equally the critics of The Confessions of Nat Turner can also offer a helpful perspective on its legacy. In spite of being hailed in the mainstream press, in 1968 Beacon Press published a thin volume of critical essays by ten prominent intellectuals, academics, psychiatrists, librarians, and magazine editors entitled, “William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond.” According to The New York Times in its profile of the novel upon its 40th anniversary in 2008, critical passages in the book included: “For all its prose power and somber earnestness,” Loyle Hairston wrote, “Styron’s novel utterly fails the simple test of honesty.” “This is meditation mired in misinterpretation,” Charles V. Hamilton wrote, “and this is history many… black people reject.” John Oliver Killens: “In terms of getting into the slave’s psyche and his idiom, it is a monumental failure.” Mike Thelwell wrote that “The Confessions” “demonstrates the persistence of… myths, racial stereotypes and literary clichés even in the best intentioned and most enlightened minds… The real ‘history’ of Nat Turner, and indeed of black people, remains to be written.” With the revolutionary spirit of 1968 on the rise, Styron unwittingly found himself in the midst of a maelstrom caused by The Confessions of Nat Turner. He began to be shouted down by student protestors when he spoke on college campuses, and in Hollywood a potential film version of the book led to protests from Ossie Davis and other prominent African-American actors which canceled a movie production. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. later encouraged Spike Lee to consider making a film version of “The Confessions” but Lee abandoned the project for financial reasons.
In his 1992 afterward to the book, William Styron remained defiant and steadfast in his decision to portray Nat Turner in this way. He said that in writing The Confessions of Nat Turner, he had “unwittingly created one of the first politically incorrect texts of our time” and he dismissed the “Ten Black Writers” as “intellectual squalor.” And while he does admit to certain “defects and vulnerabilities” with the book, he also says acknowledges his view that Nat Turner was a “person of conspicuous ghastliness” and a “dangerous religious lunatic.” Hence, why Styron took “enormous liberty with historical actuality” in the novel, and as he wrote in the initial author’s note in 1967: “Perhaps the reader will wish to draw a moral from this narrative, but it has been my own narrative, but it has been my own intention to try to recreate a man and his era, and to produce a work that is less an “historical novel” in conventional terms than a meditation on history.”
For William Styron, it was inconceivable that he would go from winning an honorary degree from Wilbeforce University, an historically black college, to only a few years later being derided as a prominent racist who degraded the story of Nat Turner. Nevertheless, as The New York Times pointed out, the “postmodern slave narrative” is a genre that has continued to thrive with novels like Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage, Edward P. Jones’s The Known World, and Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose. Apparently, Williams identified “The Confessions” as a source –albeit a negative one– for her novel, writing that she no longer wanted the African-American experience to be, as she put it, “at the mercy of literature” written by others like William Styron. Still, The Confessions of Nat Turner has continued to endure as an important piece of American literature, Time Magazine included it on the “TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.”
Notable Quotations:
“I wish they would get it over with, but whatever it is they’re going to do, burn me hang me, put out my eyes, why don’t they get it over with right now? But they had done nothing. Their spit seemed everlasting, its sourness a part of me. But save for this and the kicks and the hatpins, I had come out unharmed, wondrously so, thinking even as they chained me up and hurled me into this cell: The Lord is preparing me for a special salvation. Either that, or they are working up to some exquisite retribution quite beyond my power of comprehension. But no. I was the key to the riddle, and was to be tried” (18).
“The point is that you are animate chattel and animate chattel is capable of craft and connivery and wily stealth” (21).
“I gazed across the narrow sluggish river to the forest wall: a long mile of swamp, then flat fields and woods of the county. It would be the time of year now to lay up firewood: my thoughts moved, as in a daydream, out across cold space to some coarse thicket of beech or chestnut where already in the chill morning light a pair of slaves would be out with ax and wedge; and I could hear the chuck, chuck of the ax and the musical chink of the wedge and see the Negroes’ breaths streaming on the frosty air, and hear their voices forever innocently pitched to be heard by someone a mile away” (33).
“I could not help but begin to wonder if ownership of me did not presage a diminution of fortune, as does the possession, I am told, of a certain kind of elephant in India (44).
“It is impossible to exaggerate the extent to which white people dominate the conversation of Negroes…” (54).
“And what else did Christianity accomplish?” he said. “Here’s what Christianity accomplished. Christianity accomplished the mob. The mob. It accomplished not only our senseless butchery, the extermination of all those involved in it, black and white, but the horror of lawless retaliation and reprisal…” (113).
“Then what I done was wrong, Lord? I said. And if what I done was wrong, is there no redemption?” I raised my eyes upward but there was no answer, only the gray impermeable sky and night falling fast over Jerusalem” (115).
“He embraced me awkwardly, swiftly. I felt is whiskers against my cheek, and heard Abraham’s bullwhip crack far ahead like a musket. Then he turned about and was gone, and the wagons were gone, and it is the last I ever saw of him… I stood in the lane until the final echo of the wheels vanished rattling in the distance. My desolation was complete. As sundered from my root and branch as a falling leaf fluttering on eddies of air, I was adrift between that which was past and those things yet to come. Great boiling clouds hung on the far horizon. For a long moment I felt myself like Jonah cast into the deep, in the midst of the seas, with floods compassing me about and all God’s billows and waves passing over me” (228, the moment Nat is left by Marse Samuel to be sold to Reverend Eppes).
“My despair and loneliness grew until the existence I led seemed a nightmare from which I was frantically trying to arouse myself; the burden of my daily wretchedness felt an actual weight, heavy, and immovable, bearing down like a yoke on my shoulders” (243).
“Once in the last days before my trial, when I was pondering my own death and was filled with a sense of the absence of God” (252).
“An exquisitely sharpened hatred for the white man is of course an emotion not difficult for Negroes to harbor. Yet if truth be known, this hatred does not abound in every Negro’s soul: it relies upon too many mysterious and hidden patterns of life and chance to flourish luxuriously everywhere. Real hatred of the sort of which I speak –hatred so pure and obdurate that no sympathy, no human warmth, no flicker of compassion can make the faintest nick or scratch upon the stony surface of its being—is not common to all Negroes. Like a flower of granite with cruel leaves it grows, when it grows at all, as if from fragile seed cast upon uncertain ground. Many conditions are required for the full fruition of this hatred, for its ripe and malevolent growth, yet none of these is as important as that at one time or another the Negro live to some degree of intimacy with the white man. That he know the object of his hatred, and that he become knowledgeable about the white man’s wiles, his duplicity, his greediness, and his ultimate depravity” (257).
“So all through the long years of my twenties I was, in my outward aspects at least, the most pliant, unremarkable young slave anyone could ever imagine. My chores were toilsome and obnoxious and boring. But with forbearance on my part and through daily prayer they never became really intolerable, and I resolved to follow Moore’s commands with all the amiability I could muster” (270).
“That Sunday as I dismissed my followers with a prayer, my spirit was filled with a strange exaltation and with a sense of the imminence of glorious victory. I knew that my cause was just and, being just, would in its strength overcome all obstacles, all hardships, all inclement turns of fortune” (361).
On the 1968 Pulitzer Prize Decision
The 1968 Pulitzer Prize Jury was composed of two returning jury members from the prior year, Maxwell Geismar and Melvin “Mel” Maddocks, as well as a returning juror from another prior year, John K. Hutchens, who last served as a juror eight years earlier in 1960 when Allen Drury took home the prize for Advise and Consent. Hutchens had also served on fiction juries in years prior, including the years in which the Pulitzer Prize was awarded to A Death in the Family by James Agee in 1958 and The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters by Robert Lewis Taylor in 1959.
In 1968, the jury verdict was split. John K. Hutchens was in favor of The Confessions of Nat Turner, but Melvin Maddocks and Maxwell Geismar were in support of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Manor, a family novel of the Polish “shtetls” of a century ago. Maddocks and Geismar acknowledged that Hutchens’ opinion was dominant among critics that year, however they failed to persuade the Board of their preferred selection and the Pulitzer Prize was awarded to William Styron. As former Pulitzer Prize administrator John Hohenberg notes, the award in 1968 was announced with “no excitement” because “the first wave of its popularity already had subsided.”
Other books discussed in the Jury Report were All the Little Live Things by Wallace Stegner, The Eighth Day by Thornton Wilder, The Thousand Hour Day by Wieslaw S. KuniczakImaginary Friends by Alison Lurie, A Night of Watching by Elliot Arnold, When She Was Good by Philip Roth, Death Kit by Susan Sontag, Why Are We In Vietnam? by Norman Mailer, Fathers by Herbert Gold, Killing Time by Thomas Berger, and The Carpenter Years by Arthur Cohen.
- Maxwell Geismar (1910-1979) was a Columbia University alumnus and teacher at Harvard who became a famous literary critic for a variety of publications including The New York Times Book Review, The New York Herald Tribune, The Nation, The American Scholar, The Saturday Review of Books, The Yale Review, The Virginia Quarterly, Encyclopedia Britannica, and Compton’s Encyclopedia (he also penned a notoriously belligerent critique of Henry James).
- Melvin “Mel” Maddocks (1924-2008) was a literary critic for the Christian Science Monitor. He also wrote for The Atlantic in the late 1960s and early 1970s, contributing reviews of Proust, Hamlet, Cyril Connolly, among other articles. Maddocks penned a variety of books on topics like Claude Debussy, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, Billie Holiday, and The Atlantic Crossing. He married Jean Lister in the photo department at the Monitor and they had two sons and a daughter (and eventually one grandson).
- John K. Hutchens (1905-1995) was an author and book critic (at both the New York Herald Tribune and the New York Times Book Review), as well as a long-time judge of the Book-of-the-Month Club. He was born in Chicago and grew up in Montana –later penning a memoir of his youth– before becoming a leading editor of modern literary anthologies.
As an interesting point of note, in a prior year Styron’s editor at The Bobbs-Merrill Company –Hiram Haydn– scribbled down a tally of the final Pulitzer vote in 1952 when Styron’s earlier novel Lie Down in Darkness was in the running for the prize. The Caine Mutiny (the 1952 winner) received 14 votes, Lie Down in Darkness got 4, and Catcher in the Rye got 3 and the rest scored 2 and 1 (unknown titles). At the bottom of the note to Styron, Hiram Haydn wrote “not bad.” Indeed, receiving a higher score than Catcher in the Rye was assuredly better than “not bad.”
Who is William Styron?
William “Bill” Styron (1925-2006) was born in the Hilton Village historic district of Newport News, Virginia, the son of Pauline Margaret (Abraham), a liberal northerner, and William Clark Styron, a southern shipyard engineer who was diagnosed with clinical depression. Styron grew up in the South and was steeped in its history. In fact, his birthplace was less than a hundred miles from the site of Nat Turner’s slave rebellion, later the source for Styron’s most famous and controversial novel. Styron cared for his mother as a young child until she died from breast cancer in 1939 when he was still a boy. Styron’s grandmother was a young girl when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued. She owned two young slaves at the time, but when the Civil War came to an end she told “embellished” and “melodramatic” stories, according to Styron, which were filled with her antipathy for the Yankees –an ire which remained undiminished even in her older years in the 1930s.
Styron attended Davidson College, where he joined Phi Delta Theta, and he was a voracious reader. He transferred to Duke University and served in the U.S. Navy during World War II before returning to Duke to finish his education. Here, he published his first short stories which were heavily influenced by William Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe. His mentor was Robert Penn Warren. After graduation, he took a miserable job as an editor at McGraw-Hill in New York City. After provoking his own firing, he soon published his first novel Lie Down in Darkness (1951), which won the Rome Prize (awarded by the American Academy in Rome and the American Academy of Arts and Letters). He then published two more novels amidst his travels in Europe –The Long March (1952) and Set This House on Fire (1960)—and it was during this period that he met his wife, Rose Burgunder, who was introduced to Styron in Rome alongside Truman Capote. After their wedding, the Styrons moved to Litchfield County, Connecticut before relocating to Martha’s Vineyard where artists and writers had started to settle. There, Rose embarked on motherhood and entertaining –she was a lifelong socialite and poet—and she supported her husband by typing up his manuscripts. While living in the Styron’s guest cottage, their friend James Baldwin wrote his celebrated book The Fire Next Time. Among their many friends, the Styrons counted: director Mike Nichols, journalist Diane Sawyer, writer Philip Roth, playwright Arthur Miller, photographer Inge Morath, composer Leonard Bernstein, singer Carly Simon, Mia Farrow and Frank Sinatra, poet Robert Frost, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Lionel Trilling, as well as politicians like the Kennedys. The only figure who ever declined to join the Styrons for a meal was Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
William Styron spent his days methodically working on his novels. He demanded utter silence, even with their small children in the house. He had a stone wall built in front of their house to muffle the noise of passing vehicles, to his daughter Alexandra in her 2011 memoir, Reading My Father. As was typical of his routine,Styron would rise at noon, enjoy a leisurely lunch or brunch with Rose, and depart for a two o’clock a long walk with his dogs, while he organized his thoughts for the afternoon onslaught of writing approximately 600 words which he refined with Rose into the evening over drinks. He was known to not revise heavily, and his meticulous eye was conscripted by L.B.J.’s speechwriter, Richard Goodwin, to help craft the language for a speech on major civil rights legislation making its way through Congress.
What followed was a string of books, the most famous and controversial of which were The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) and also Sophie’s Choice (1979), both of which are still renowned to this day. Whereas The Confessions of Nat Turner won the Pulitzer Prize and the William Dean Howells Medal in 1970, Sophie’s Choice won the National Book Award (1980). The latter, an account of three people living in a Brooklyn boarding house, wound up being Styron’s last novel. Amidst other publications and a memoir entitled Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990), Styron suffered from severe bouts of clinical depression. He died of pneumonia at the age of 81 on Martha’s Vineyard and he is buried at West Chop Cemetery in Vineyard Haven, Dukes County, Massachusetts. His wife Rose –with whom he had four children—is still alive as of the time of this writing. In 2023, at the age of 95, she was profiled by 60 Minutes for her long years of hosting prominent celebrities, entrepreneurs, academics, and politicians on Martha’s Vineyard. Even in old age, she was in the midst of publishing a memoir entitled Beyond This Harbor, completing a documentary, and conducting her international humanitarian philanthropy. Among numerous stories of charming A-list parties, she also recounted her life with her late husband William, and both of their infidelities. By all accounts, in her interview she describes having led a full life of optimism and enrichment.
Note: there are a variety of recorded interviews William Styron delivered over the years which are available online, but he also gave a memorable interview The Paris Review in 1954 prior to the rise of his most successful books, and then again in 1999. Having recently read the 1954 interview he gave to George Plimpton and Peter Mattiessen, I was all-too giddy to witness this amusing mid-century portrait of William Styron as he joined his interviewers for drinks in Paris.
Film Adaptation:
- The Birth of a Nation (2016)
- Director: Nate Parker
- Starring: Nate Parker, Armie Hammer, Mark Boone Junior, Colman Domingo and others
While not exactly a direct adaptation of William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, The Birth of a Nation (2016) addresses the same historical event. And interestingly enough, while the film’s title is a clear allusion to D.W. Griffith’s blatantly racist, KKK-friendly 1915 cinematic epic of the same name. The 2016 film was also released amidst a flurry of shadowy lurid scandals, not least of which included substance abuse, rape allegations, suicide, and other controversies.
Literary Context in 1967-1968
- Nobel Prize for Literature (1967): Guatemalan writer Miguel Ángel Asturias “for his vivid literary achievement, deep-rooted in the national traits and traditions of Indian peoples of Latin America.”
- National Book Award Winner (1968): Thornton Wilder’s The Eighth Day.
- Per Publishers Weekly, the #1 bestseller in 1967 was The Arrangement by Elia Kazan. It was followed by The Confessions of Nat Turner (#2) and among the others on the list was The Eighth Day by Thornton Wilder (#6) Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin (#7).
- This year saw the first publication of Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita in final form left upon the author’s death in 1940.
- Norman Mailer was arrested for civil disobedience protesting the Vietnam War.
- The first issue of Rolling Stone was published.
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward was banned in the Soviet Union.
- S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders was first published.
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude was published.
- Topaz by Leon Uris was published. It was a bestseller and it was later made into a feature film directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
- The Chosen by Chaim Potok was published. It was also a bestseller.
Did The Right Book Win?
While I appreciated the opportunity to learn about a new literary scandal that engulfed The Confessions of Nat Turner, on the whole this novel struck me as an excessively provocative, historically revisionist work that I surely would not have selected for the Pulitzer Prize myself. Sometimes the controversy surrounding the novel is more interesting than the novel itself. William Styron, a liberal-minded writer, should be rightly praised for finding the courage to trespass into forbidden territory and imagine what it might have been like to walk in the chains of Nat Turner, and likewise his critics should also be praised for finding the strength to demand a greater degree of historical integrity for popular works of historical fiction, but in the end, this is not a book I would soon revisit again in the future. With that being said, I know of no superior stand-out work of American fiction published in the year 1967 that would have easily unseated The Confessions of Nat Turner for the Pulitzer Prize, even if there were several renowned international novels published that same year (which were not eligible for the Pulitzer) including Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Styron, William. The Confessions of Nat Turner. Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc. New York, NY. 1992 (originally published in 1966, 1967).
This book is dedicated to James Terry, Lilliam Hellman, and Styron’s wife and children.