William Styron

American writer, the author of "Sophie's Choice" and "Darkness Visible," a best seller of 1990. The book is a profound description of depression, a disorder that affects some 10-to-20 million Americans. The unspeakable darkness which people experience makes suicide a response to unbearable pain. Stricken by the illness in 1985 at the age of 60, he stressed the difference between everyday blues and the blanketing darkness that makes life a horror.

William Styron was a sickly child, by his own account, which was conducive to being introspective. He inherited a predisposition toward depression from his father, a Newport News, Virginia engineer who died in 1978. He never completely mourned the death of his mother when he was 14. Later, he recalled chronically abusing alcohol to banish what must have been the edge of gray that he had almost every day. He earned a bachelor of arts degree at Duke University in 1947 and studied writing at the New School for Social Research.

Styron was an associate editor for McGraw-Hill Book Company in New York in 1947. He wrote critically acclaimed "Lie Down in the Darkness" in 1951 at age 24 as a neophyte novelist. In it he described the terrible despair that foreshadowed the darkness he would encounter when he was stricken with clinical depression. Other notable works include "The Confessions of Nat Turner," 1967 and best-seller "Sophie’s Choice," 1979, which features a heroine who suffered from a despair so bleak that it eventually led to suicide. "Sophie’s Choice" was made into a movie.

In the 1950s, he began an off-and-on relationship with Norman Mailer, which was complicated by a rivalry that developed between the two writers. Mailer broke off the relationship privately and later attacked Styron publicly in print. Styron chose to answer Mailer’s attacks by placing parts of Mailer’s private letters to him in his novel, "Set This House on Fire." After an estrangement of many years, they reconciled in the 1980s.