Selected Letters of William Styron Hardcover - 2012

Media reviews

Advance praise for Selected Letters of William Styron
 
“I first encountered Bill Styron when, at twenty, I read The Confessions of Nat Turner. Hillary and I became friends with Bill and Rose early in my presidency, but I continued to read him, fascinated by the man and his work, his triumphs and troubles, the brilliant lights and dark corners of his amazing mind. These letters, carefully and lovingly selected by Rose, offer real insight into both the great writer and the good man.”—President Bill Clinton

“The Bill Styron revealed in these letters is altogether the Bill Styron who was a dear friend and esteemed colleague to me for close to fifty years. The humor, the generosity, the loyalty, the self-awareness, the commitment to literature, the openness, the candor about matters closest to him—all are on display in this superb selection of his correspondence. The directness in the artful sentences is such that I felt his beguiling presence all the while that I was enjoying one letter after another.”—Philip Roth
 
“Bill Styron’s letters were never envisioned, far less composed, as part of the Styron oeuvre, yet that is what they turn out to be. Brilliant, passionate, eloquent, insightful, moving, dirty-minded, indignant, and hilarious, they accumulate power in the reading, becoming in themselves a work of literature.”—Peter Matthiessen

“These letters open a window into the free workings of a brilliant mind. Composed with humor and profundity, the letters reveal the soul of a great writer, and powerfully suggest that the man never wrote an ill-formed sentence in his life.”—Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Citations

• Booklist, 11/15/2012, Page 7
• Choice, 09/01/2013, Page 0
• Kirkus Reviews, 11/01/2012, Page 0
• Library Journal, 07/01/2012, Page 57
• New York Review of Books, 01/10/2013, Page 32
• New York Times Book Review, 01/13/2013, Page 14
• Publishers Weekly, 10/22/2012, Page 0
• Shelf Awareness, 12/18/2012, Page 0