William Styron
American novelist (1925–2006), author of Lie Down in Darkness (1951), The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), Sophie's Choice (1979), and the memoir Darkness Visible (1990). Mailer meets him in 1951, the year of Styron's debut novel and of Barbary Shore; the two become close friends, and briefly neighbors when the Mailers move to Bridgewater, Connecticut in the fall of 1956. The friendship ruptures around 1958; the two reconcile partially in later decades.
Mailer meets Styron and James Jones in 1951. Lennon: “the three young novelists become friends immediately”.
The Mailers’ fall-1956 move to Bridgewater, Connecticut, was partly to be near Styron’s home. The friendship curdles by 1958 — Lennon’s 1958 entry notes Mailer’s return to New York after “a bitter fallout with Styron.” The rupture colors Mailer’s literary essays through the early 1960s; Styron, for his part, was among the writers assessed (not admiringly) in Mailer’s “Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room” (59.10).
Styron’s own lifelong circle included the Kennedys; the two writers’ Cold War and 1960s political sympathies frequently diverged sharply.
Related pages
- 1951 | 1956 | 1958
- James Jones | Bridgewater, Connecticut
- Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room (59.10)