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« Election indirection | Main | A portrait of the maus as a young artist » Thursday, November 2, 2006William Styron 1925-2006By now you know that William Styron, a writer best known for the wrenching novel "Sophie's Choice," has died in Martha's Vineyard of pneumonia. Styron had, as Norman Mailer said yesterday, an incomparably "omnipresent and exquisite ... sense of the elegiac." Whether his struggles with severe depression contributed to his gentle yet penetrating touch with the dark side of the human condition is hard to know, but a difficult conclusion to resist. Styron is to be commended, I believe, for his frank and even beautiful discussion of his mental illness, long before it was fashionable, or even acceptable in certain polite circles, to commit such private pain in print. His "Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness," to be re-released by the Modern Library in Janoary, remains a keystone of the literature. It was illuminating and universal rather than merely revealing and personal. In that book he memorably rejected the word depression as flat, misleading, and insufficient to capture the horror of the lived experience. "Brainstorm" would come closer to describing the attack from within, he felt, if it were not already in use for another, lowlier purpose. Styron will be missed. Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:07 PM
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