William Styron, author of ‘Sophie’s Choice’, dies at 81
William Styron, the American novelist who wrote Sophie’s Choice, has died of pneumonia after a long illness. He was 81.
 Styron, who endured a lifelong battle with depression that took him through alcoholism to the brink of suicide in the 1980s, wrote two of America’s most controversial and highly regarded novels of the second half of the twentieth century: The Confessions of Nat Turner, the story of a black slave revolt published at the height of the civil rights movement, and Sophie’s Choice, the story of a haunted Holocaust survivor.
Fellow authors praised him today. “This is terrible,” said Kurt Vonnegut, the beat generation novelist and an old friend of Styron’s. “He was dramatic, he was fun. He was strong and proud and he was awfully good with the language. I hated to see him end this way.”
Norman Mailer, the writer and essayist, told The New York Times: “No other American writer of my generation has had so omnipresent and exquisite a sense of the elegiac. That is no mean virtue in these years.”
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