Selected Letters of William Styron Read Online Free

he was when he wrote a letter. In this way, readers can track his movements—often alternating seasonally between Roxbury, Connecticut, and Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts—but his extensive travel around the world is also catalogued in these letters. We have dispensed with elaborate abbreviations of archival locations, autograph versus typescript letters, and the like in order to include more of Styron’s actual correspondence. Unfortunately, there is no single location in which to view Styron’s letters. Our efforts to collect material from libraries(The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin and Yale University’s Beinecke Library and Manuscripts and Archives among them) represent a small fraction of the publicly and privately held letters that we solicited, copied, and received in order to represent Styron’s correspondence. In other words, you hold in your hands the closest approximation to an archive of this writer’s letters. Please enjoy them in the spirit in which they were written and received.

WILLIAM STYRON: A TIMELINE
 
1925      
Born William Clark Styron, Jr., on June 11 in Newport News, in the Tidewater region of Virginia.
1932–37      
The Styrons move to Hilton Village, a small community just outside Newport News, in 1932.
1939      
Pauline dies on July 20, after years of intense pain.
1940      
Starts his first year at Christchurch, a small Episcopal boys’ prep school near West Point, Virginia, in September.
1941      
Father and Elizabeth Buxton marry and move to Hampton Roads.
1942      
Completes year at Davidson College in North Carolina. Transfers to Duke University to join the Marines’ V-12 program and enrolls in Professor William Blackburn’s creative writing course.
1944–45      
Ordered to boot camp at Parris Island, South Carolina (sent to the VD ward with a mistaken diagnosis of syphilis). Transferred to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, for officer training, then sent to Platoon Commander School at Quantico, Virginia, where he is commissioned a second lieutenant.
1946      
After the war ends, Styron returns to Duke University. In summer, signs up as a deckhand on the
Cedar Rapids Victory
, a merchant cattle ship bound for Trieste.
1947      
Graduates from Duke and reenlists in the Marine Corps Reserve. Moves to New York City and becomes an assistant editor at Whittlesey House, but is soon fired. Inherits $1000 from his maternal grandmother’s estate, which, combined with his GI benefits, allows him to survive without taking another job. Enrolls in a fiction-writing seminar at the New School for Social Research atthe invitation of its instructor, Hiram Haydn. Haydn arranges a $250 advance from Crown for Styron’s first novel.
1948–49      
Briefly returns to Durham before moving back to New York City. Stays rent-free with Sigrid de Lima, a friend from the New School, and her mother, Agnes (Aggie) de Lima, then finds a room in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, where he meets an Auschwitz survivor named Sophie. Faces money problems as GI benefits run out and accepts an offer to live rent-free with Aggie and Sigrid de Lima at their country residence in Valley Cottage, a village near Nyack, New York, north of the city. Father urges Styron to continue working on his first novel and pledges to send $100 a month until its completion.
1950      
Hiram Haydn leaves Crown for Bobbs-Merrill in Indianapolis. Styron negotiates a release from his contract with Crown and follows Haydn.
1951      
Recalled by the Marine Corps, but Haydn secures him a deferment. Pushes himself physically and emotionally to write the final one hundred pages of
Lie Down in Darkness
before returning to the service.
 
Completes an all-night, thirty-three-mile march, and soon afterward is discharged because of a cataract in his right eye.
 
Lie Down in Darkness
published September 10. Invited by Louis D. Rubin, Jr., to meet with