INFLUENCES ON WRITING

William Styron

Race

Gender

William Styron was a well known novelist who became known as "the face of the South". In his stories, Styron focused both on strong female and male figures. Styron did not see men as superior to women, instead, he viewed women to be equally as strong as men; both emotionally and physically. In his novel, Lie Down in Darkness, Styron speaks of an average woman's struggle in this passage: "Perhaps that's good for a man — finally to know what suffering is, to know what a woman somehow knows almost from the day she's born."

Not only did William Styron's writings focus on the cruelty of lack slavery, but he also wrote novels about the Holocaust- such as "Sophie's Choice". In this novel, a young girl is shipped to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where she is treated inhumanly. Thus, brings up Styron's ideas of how humans can tear down and completely obliterate others: "I have learned to cry again and I think perhaps that means I am a human being again. Perhaps that at least. A piece of human being but yes, a human being."

Class

Education

William Styron grew up as an average boy, fairly religious, and lived in the middle class. He faced depression, anxiety, and multiple other mental disorders. He used writing to express his feelings, like the paragraph in Nat Turner expressing how religion and class slaves your mind; "My grand mother, who was very religious, and to whom I was much attached — my master, who belonged to the church, and other religious persons who visited the house, and whom I often saw at prayers, noticing the singularity of my manners, I suppose, and my uncommon intelligence for a child, remarked I had too much sense to be raised – and if I was, I would never be of any service to any one – as a slave."

Styron attended public school until third grade, when his father sent him to Christchurch School, an Episcopal college-preparatory school in the Tidewater region of Virginia. Upon graduation, Styron enrolled in Davidson College[4] and joined Phi Delta Theta. By the age of eighteen he was reading the writers who would have a lasting influence on his vocation as a novelist and writer, especially Thomas Wolfe.[4] Styron transferred to Duke University in 1943 as a part of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps V-12 program aimed at fast-tracking officer candidates by enrolling them simultaneously in basic training and bachelor's degree programs.