William Styron - Nat Turner Controversy

Nat Turner Controversy

Above the door to his writing studio, Styron posted a quotation from Gustave Flaubert:

A dictum of sorts, Flaubert's words proved themselves prophetic over the intervening years. The unyielding originality of Styron's next two novels, published between 1967 and 1979, sparked much controversy and may have caused the violent responses they received. Styron, feeling wounded by his first truly harsh reviews for Set This House On Fire, would spend the years after its publication both researching and composing his next novel, the fictitious memoirs of the historical Nathaniel "Nat" Turner, a slave who led a slave rebellion in 1831.

Styron was now an eyewitness to another time of rebellion in the United States. He was living and writing at the heart of the turbulent decade of the 1960s, a time highlighted by the counterculture revolution. So while Styron was researching and composing his next novel, narrated from the perspective of a militant slave, he was living in a time that coincided with the Black Power movement, political struggle, civil unrest, and racial tension. With increased media attention, both on television and in print, the public response to this social upheaval was furious and intense: battle lines were being drawn. In 1968, Styron signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.

In this atmosphere of dissent, many had criticized Styron's friend and fellow novelist, James Baldwin, for his novel Another Country published in 1962. Among the many criticisms of the book was outrage over a black author (Baldwin) choosing a white woman as the protagonist of a story that tells of her involvement with a black man. Baldwin was Styron's house guest and interlocutor for several months following the critical storm generated by Another Country. Baldwin was able to catch glimpses of the early drafts of Styron's new novel. Baldwin predicted that Styron's work would face even harsher scrutiny than the reception of Another Country. “Bill’s going to catch it from both sides,” he told an interviewer immediately following the 1967 publication of Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner.

Baldwin's prediction was correct, and despite public defenses of Styron by leading artists of the time, figures such as Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, numerous other black critics reviled Styron’s portrayal of Turner as racist stereotyping. Particularly controversial was a passage in which Turner fantasizes about raping a white woman. Styron also writes of a situation where Turner and another slave boy have a homosexual encounter while alone in the woods. Several critics pointed to this as a dangerous perpetuation of a traditional Southern justification for lynching. Despite the controversy, the novel became a runaway critical and financial success, eventually winning the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the William Dean Howells Medal in 1970.