William Styron is an author who is very generous with the time of his readers. Therefore, he must also meet the claim to deliver something that justifies the effort, still struggling today with his "Confessions of Nat Turner."

The debate about whether a white writer from the 20th century is allowed to write a novel about a black rebel from the 19th century and to what extent a 50-year-old book in terms of word choice and design meets current claims in terms of political correctness is not conducted here. Especially since Styron is anyway not able to go too far beyond his experience horizon. Filling a rather patchy and possibly falsified confession with the own DNA of a very ego-bound author will at most be able to deliver a conditionally believable psychogram of a religiously motivated rebel. Styron's Nat is and feels as black as a correspondingly made-up Laurence Olivier or Richard Burton as Othello. Which does not necessarily mean that Will Smith or Denzel Washington would be better suited by nature to play a convincing Moor of Venice or a more believable black rebel leader who interprets the Bible according to his circumstances.

But back to the blacked-up leading actors from old times: Even outstanding performances of the two century mimes seem rather strange or artificial and very far away from today's perspective.

The distance to Styron's confessions, which worked quite well as a controversial bestseller at the time, has remained quite large for me throughout the entire reading time, even though I had to give him a few good grades for his stance. The first part, "Day of Judgment," is a 106-page inner monologue of the rebel leader in prison. Embedded in it are debates with a Mr. Gray, who has a prosecutor and a defense attorney in his service and already knows the verdict, dealing once again with the blood toll of the uprising instigated by Nat. Also the curiosity that the Bible-steadfast leader and spiritual father of the rebellion can only be brought to court for one murder. The approximately 16-year-old plantation owner's daughter Margaret Whitehead, to whom Turner had a special relationship of trust. Against the background of scientific discoveries, Gray questions not only Nat's calling but also the entire Bible book. And the fighter of God has not heard the voice of his Lord for a long time.

The second part, "Bygone Times," describes the youth history of Nat and his ancestors from the robbery of his grandmother from Guinea on. As a house nigger educated in the caste spirit and a pedagogical experiment of his owner, Nat, who receives training as a carpenter, looks down on the dirty "field niggers" and awaits his release. A story of spiritual pride that culminates in the David-and-Jonathan relationship with his successor as a carpenter's apprentice. The decline of agriculture on the depleted soils of Virginia with more and more abandoned farms forms the gloomy background of the idyll of personal awakening. The unexpected sale of his younger friend Willis, which Preceptor Nat gets a beating for before he baptizes him, announces the turn for the worse. When his worldly owner tries a new beginning elsewhere and delegates Nat's release to a sleazy clergyman who is more interested in thick Negro tails, the low point in Nat's life begins. Twenty hours of continuous operation in the clergyman's chicken coop are the revenge for too little compliance before Nat changes owners for $400. His new master can't even read and thanks him for the unsolicited deciphering of the signpost to avoid a detour with a lash.

The third part, "Learning to Fight," describes Nat's awakening time and the last ten years but sometimes leaves the chronology again.

So the reader only learns on the last two pages how Nat caused his own uprising to fail, in which he no longer set the tone at all but was a man who can kill most ruthlessly, while the spiritual father and strategist proves to be a failure with the ax.

The uprising, which was doomed to failure from the start, takes up 35 of 150 pages and perhaps another five pages of pre-echoes in the first part but never reaches the visual presence of the everyday scenes. Especially intense and detail-obsessed are the scenes with Margaret, as Styron delivers every breath of white girl sweat and lavender scent and creates something like a last temptation during an outing. Her murder to regain his authority in the power struggle with the bloodthirsty Will remains relatively underlit.

Conclusion: A rather well-intentioned book that is far from being worth the fuss that some people make about it just because a white author has chosen a black main character who had a weakness for white girls. A good 350 pages of approach in the form of a black bildungsroman to a rather pitiful revolt are quite a lot of wood. Let others write their fingers raw or break their heads until they can't anymore about Styron's possible racism in the portrayal of the life of the leader of the only slave uprising in the United States. What bothers me much more is how much time he takes to tell his story. Especially how poorly balanced this book, which was created in seven (possibly quite moist and sociable) years, has turned out. My copy was a rather virgin Bertelsmann compulsory acquisition from the second quarter of 1970. For the German market, there was only a TB edition of Bill Clinton's favorite book in the early eighties. The next comparable titles on my reading list on this topic are "Roots" and "Gone with the Wind."

Definitely, this is the hardest book to get through among all the ones I've read this year. It presents a truly amazing story of the life of Nat Turner, especially the events that led up to his famous rebellion. However, it's difficult to determine which parts of the narrative are true or at least based on his confessions and records, and which are literary choices made by Styron. The book is not precisely historical fiction, nor is it exactly a fictional autobiography. It aims to remain as faithful as possible to the known facts of Turner's life, yet it's also filled with prose that details settings and relationships that couldn't have entirely come from his confessions. The author writes in his forward that the intention of this work was to be a "mediation on history", and it definitely accomplishes that. Whether factual or not, the image of Nat Turner evoked by this book offers a story about the complexity of life under slavery, as well as the obsession, planning, and execution of such a bold attempt to overthrow the institution. It's an outstanding piece of literature that attempts to explain a rebellion that was completely beyond the imagination of the people who lived through it and completely outside the living memory of its writer and readers (since it was written over a hundred years after the revolt).

In 1831, within Southampton County, Virginia, enslaved Black men rose up in rebellion.

This led to the loss of approximately 55 white lives, many of whom were women and children.

In "The Confessions of Nat Turner", the author William Styron, who had grown up near the area of the uprising, reimagines the events.

He speculates on what might have driven Nathaniel Turner, the leader of the rebellion and described as "the smartest [redacted] in Southampton County", to plan and recruit his accomplices for this bloody affair.

In Styron's portrayal, Turner is a uniquely sensitive and wounded individual, with plenty of reasons to detest the institution of slavery and the whites who have enabled and profited from his enslavement.

However, I believe that today's reader must fairly pose the question of whether Styron, a white man, is the "right" author to retell this story from Turner's perspective.

And also consider whether, in doing so, he might not reinforce harmful stereotypes.

Scenes that depict the protagonist's longing to sexually dominate a young white woman are particularly unfortunate and cringeworthy.

At the height of his fame, William Styron was one of America’s pre-eminent novelists. His name was invariably present in any list of the luminaries of the post-World War 2 generation of Big Male Writers, such as Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and others.

Yet, like some of that group (James Jones comes to mind), Styron’s star has to a large degree faded. Some of the diminishment may be due to the fact that he was never prolific, and his reputation must stand or fall on a tiny handful of books. Additionally, he suffered a very long decline as a writer in his later years. His fourth and final novel, the celebrated “Sophie’s Choice,” appeared in 1979. From then until his death in 2006, he published very little other than a brief memoir of his struggles with depression, “Darkness Visible,” and a brief collection of stories, “A Tidewater Morning.”

Both these books were published in small formats with large print and wide margins in an obvious attempt to make them look more substantial than they were. In fact, neither was really book-length (even with all the formatting tricks, “Darkness Visible” still only runs 85 pages). While both “Darkness Visible” and “A Tidewater Morning” contain powerful and even beautiful writing, it’s fair to wonder what in the world happened to William Styron.

Offhand, the only similar fade to silence I can think of from a major artist is that of the composer Sibelius, who released no new music in his last thirty years, though rumors of another symphony were always rife—just as rumors of a new William Styron novel (it was to be called “The Way of the Warrior”) were too.

I discovered Styron at the tail end of what turned out to be his heyday. This was in 1985, when I was a student at the College of the Redwoods in Arcata, California. I’d heard a great deal about the novel “Sophie’s Choice,” and even more about the movie, but was unfamiliar with either. Burning to know more about this writer, who was part of my favorite generation of American literary figures (I was already deeply immersed in Capote, Vidal, Baldwin, and Mailer), I went to the school library only to discover that the single copy they had of “Sophie’s Choice” was checked out.

However, they had another Styron title. It was called “The Confessions of Nat Turner.” I took it home and read it in, I think, two days flat, awed by the power of its theme and language. Styron immediately soared to the top of my must-read list, and I quickly devoured everything else the man had ever published. He remains a key writer in my life.

“The Confessions of Nat Turner” was controversial from the beginning. In the novel, Styron chooses to write in the first-person voice of Nat Turner himself, perhaps the greatest rebel slave of the nineteenth century—the man who led a band of Virginia slaves in 1831 to murder over fifty whites. Styron’s choice of first person may not seem like an issue today, but it’s important to realize that the book was published in 1967—at the very height of the Civil Rights movement, and at virtually the very moment the movement began to harden and become more militant with the rise of Black Power.

While the novel was an enormous commercial success and won the Pulitzer Prize, some in the black intellectual community were angered by it to such a degree that a kind of counter-commentary, “William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond,” was published in 1968. The sole purpose of this was to attack, denigrate, and ridicule the novel—and Styron himself—in any way possible, reasonable or not.

Reading a historical novel from another era results in a kind of double vision. On the one hand, we can admire Styron’s gorgeous evocation of Virginia in 1831—his prose is as sure-footedly lyrical as Capote’s or Baldwin's. On the other hand, we can’t help but see how this narrative is very much a product of a 1960’s white man’s imagination. Styron is masterful at depicting Turner’s mental anguish at being enslaved; this book marked what was surely the first time most white readers had ever seriously contemplated the horror of the idea. This was, remember, ten years before “Roots” seared its way into the national consciousness. Styron’s Nat Turner is a brilliantly conceived character, and his inner turmoil is fully convincing on its own terms.

But it must be admitted that some of those “terms” are, read today, a bit odd. Styron’s Nat Turner often seems more preoccupied with sex than liberation, and in a crucial move that brought down much of the black critical ire on him, the author invented a tension-filled, love-hate relationship (not a love affair, as some claim) between Turner and Margaret Whitehead, the lovely young belle who was, according to the historical record, Turner’s only actual victim—the only person he himself killed. I find the several scenes between them powerful and even painful to read, with Margaret’s nascent humanism struggling to overcome her lifetime’s teachings about the worthlessness of black people. But these scenes are also easy to misinterpret, to read merely as another “Birth of a Nation”-like depiction of a black man lusting after a white woman.

Styron also left himself open to criticism by eliminating most of the black influences in Turner’s life—although the historical record indicates that Nat Turner was close to both his parents as well as his grandmother, Styron all but eliminates these figures from his story, instead focusing almost exclusively on Turner’s relationships with his various white masters. I can’t help but wonder how conscious this decision was on Styron’s part; it may simply have been that he felt more comfortable depicting scenes between blacks and whites than in trying to imagine black family relationships.

In 1968, Styron published an essay, “‘O Lost! Etc.” bemoaning the fact that the reputation of one of his literary heroes, Thomas Wolfe, had “sunk so low.” Poor Wolfe, he wrote, “if not dead is certainly moribund, and the matter of his resuscitation is certainly in doubt.” Little did William Styron know that within a few years of his death, much the same could be said of his own literary legacy. In any event, “The Confessions of Nat Turner” remains an admirable attempt to bridge the racial divide—a divide that in 1967 surely seemed more like an endless chasm. It’s the book that first sparked my interest in American slavery, an interest that led to my teaching a course on the subject for some years as well as, eventually, writing a collection of poems about a different historical event of the slavery period (see my book “The Weeping Time”). For those reasons, I can only give “The Confessions of Nat Turner”—whatever its flaws—five stars.

Leave it to Styron to pen a first-person perspective narrative of a black slave.

It is truly astonishing that he would choose to take on such a subject matter. If one desires to relive the offensive stereotype of a black man persistently fantasizing about sexually assaulting innocent white women, then by all means, go ahead and read this work.

However, I am completely at a loss as to why this book was awarded the Pulitzer.

Surely, there are countless other works that are more deserving of such a prestigious accolade.

The content within this book seems to perpetuate harmful and inaccurate stereotypes, rather than challenging or breaking them down.

It is disheartening to think that such a book could be held in such high regard.

Perhaps it is a reflection of the times in which it was written, but that does not excuse its flaws.

Overall, I find myself deeply disappointed and confused by the acclaim that this book has received.

Absolutely, this is one of the best books I’ve ever read! It was written many years ago, but it remains as good now as it was then. The language used in the book is eloquent beyond description. The author has painted such amazing imagery that it feels like you are right there in the story. However, be prepared to have your dictionary ready, as there were a number of words that I didn’t know. But this only added to the charm of the book and made me want to learn more. It is truly a masterpiece that will stay with you long after you have finished reading it. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who loves a good read and wants to be transported to another world.

Not great…

I did some research after finishing this story and I truly wish I had picked up any book that was actually about Nat Turner and his revolution.

It seems that my initial exploration of this topic was rather limited.

Had I delved deeper into the relevant literature, I might have gained a more comprehensive and accurate understanding of Nat Turner and the significance of his actions.

The revolution led by Nat Turner was a momentous event in American history, and there are likely many details and perspectives that I missed.

Perhaps by reading a dedicated book on the subject, I could have uncovered the true essence of his struggle and the impact it had on the society of that time.

From now on, I will be more cautious in my selection of reading materials and make sure to choose those that can provide me with a more in-depth and detailed knowledge of the topics that interest me.

In 1831, Nat Turner led the most significant slave uprising in American history. With a mob of slaves in Virginia, he brutally murdered 60 white men, women, and children. A white slaveowner named Thomas Ruffin Gray interviewed Turner in prison, and this is claimed to be his first-person account of his life and revolt.

However, the motives of Gray and the authenticity of the whole thing have been widely questioned. There were witnesses to the confession, but none were sympathetic to Turner's mission of murdering all their babies. I find this piece about the Confessions interesting. (Like any discussion of this primary source, it gets intertwined with Styron's Pulitzer-winning 1967 The Confessions of Nat Turner.) We're unlikely to get a definite answer, but the tendency has been to more or less accept it as true. It seems to me that Gray wrote down what Turner told him. (Along with some "Holy shit!"-style asides.)

Turner, who taught himself to read at a young age and appears highly intelligent, claims that God communicates with him and ordered him to fight. What he describes closely resembles schizophrenia. On the other hand, it also aligns with the actions of God in the Bible. Turner's confession mainly provides a step-by-step, almost matter-of-fact description of the revolt. He explains that his object was to spread terror and devastation. As he went, he gathered a crowd of slaves, sometimes drunk, who carried out most of the bloody work.

This is disturbing stuff, but it's worth reading. It's not boring and is very short. As a (probable) primary source about the effects and events of slavery, it's fascinating. While Turner's actions were terrible, so was the institution of slavery that drove him. History has judged Turner's rebellion as a bad idea, leading to the retributive murder of 200 slaves and the passage of more restrictive laws. In contrast, John Brown's rebellion in 1860 is credited as a spark for the Civil War. Maybe Brown's timing was better, but both events were inevitable reactions to slavery. Turner pleaded not guilty, saying he didn't feel so. Fair enough.

This is an extremely difficult review to write.

I found the book very interesting with some twists and turns I did not expect. When I started the book, I knew little about Nat Turner except that well before John Brown and the Civil War, Turner led the only slave revolt that occurred in the United States. Ever.

Writing in first person, Styron suggested personalities and causalities of known events that are not part of the extremely limited factual evidence of this enigmatic man.

Unexpectedly, William Styron touched off a firestorm of controversy he never expected. Initially, the reception of his book was strongly positive by the Black academic community. But this was the 60s and the unmentionable soon hit the proverbial spinning device.

The result labeled Styron's book excessively racist and him as an outrage, earning disgust by black folks even to this day. While whites continue to read the book, only rarely will blacks in the US even pick it up.

Criticisms of the book are often required reading in Black Studies programs, but there is no equivalent reading of the book itself, suggesting a lop-sided, uneven environment of critique. How can you understand the criticisms of a work if you've not read the work? That, frankly, takes bias to an extreme and one could suggest that Styron may not be the only one who deserves a badge of racism.

I'm not going into details of the criticisms nor of Styron's responses to them. They don't matter here. But I can understand much of the reaction of black people. Is their reaction fair? How can I judge? I don't experience life in the USA in the way they do.

I've never been stopped for driving through the wrong neighborhood. I've never been stopped by police while walking in my own, mostly white, neighborhood and challenged as to why I'm there. I've never been a parent who got a call that my teenage son was killed by police after a routine traffic stop (when a video of the incident taken by one of the boys in the car showed that the boys did nothing to incite the officer).

Even still, I can see how the depiction of Turner, fictitious though it was, played to many negative, false stereotypes of blacks held by many whites even today. For myself, as a white, the book gave me another sense of the horrors of slavery.

It also illuminated the way in which whites acted toward slaves with no awareness of them as people with feelings, reactions, wants and desires. Or at least no more than the family dog or a favorite horse. Slaves were, after all, counted among the livestock of an owner.

There were elements in the book that shocked me. They shocked the blacks who read it in the 60s. My gut reaction was "uh-oh", verboten, verboten -- bad things coming. And they did.

Wow, that was truly profound, man. I'm not entirely certain what to precisely say about this book.

Throughout the process of reading, I found my loyalties constantly shifting. It was extremely difficult to distinguish between the so-called bad guys and the good guys.

Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that there is no absolute good and bad. Instead, there are only flawed humans who are doing what they believe is God's will.

This is a unique historical novel based on a true event that occurred in the 1820s - 30s in Tidewater, VA, regarding a slave revolt. Styron does an excellent job of inventing the imagined voices of the characters in this tragic drama.

Then I think about the graphically violent nature of the characters and the time when this book was written - the late 1960s, a time of Civil Rights, race riots, MLK, Bobby Kennedy, Vietnam, and all that. I have to imagine that Styron received a significant number of death threats for writing this book.

I wonder what would happen if Eldridge Cleaver, Malcolm X, George Wallace, and Lester Maddox all read this book in the same room simultaneously.

To have written this book at that particular time required a great deal of courage on Styron's part. I know it was praised by several prominent black American authors at the time. However, this book must have had a huge social impact when it was written on both sides of the color line.

I maintain my own ratings on a separate scale. I'm not going to give it a 5 in my scale, but it is very close. It is comparable to and in some ways superior to Sophie's Choice. Although it may not be as compelling a story (at least to me), the writing is superior. It definitely deserved the prizes it won. Styron was truly in his prime.

While reading this short pamphlet, what frequently occurred to me was the question of its authenticity.

It's not that I doubted whether Nat Turner led a slave uprising in Virginia that led to the slaughter of several whites and the killing of many slaves, both those involved and those not involved in the uprising itself, in retaliation by gangs of frightened slaveholders.

Rather, it was whether these "confessions" of Nat Turner, supposedly accurately written down by a white lawyer while Turner was in prison awaiting execution, were really his words or not.

Since this pamphlet contains the only information we're likely to ever have about Turner (primary evidence, that is), an answer to this question is unlikely.

I just find it interesting that Turner supposedly suffered from "religious mania" and attributed his uprising to this source: he heard the voice of God or an angel tell him to do it (in other words, he was insane).

Isn't it more likely that the inhumanity of the system caused a slave uprising (which is perfectly understandable) and that the white establishment, afraid of encouraging a similarly successful repetition (not to mention fueling the fires of Northern abolitionists by showing that slaves were actually not happy and singing people loving their masters), then fabricated some cock and bull story of one insane slave who led a revolt?

Part of my ambivalent acceptance of this theory stems, in part, from the text of the "confessions," during which it appears that Turner "led" very little in terms of actual killing or action: during many (perhaps most) of the killings in the text, Turner was absent or not involved.

I don't know. It may be a historical curiosity, but there seems to be little of substantive value here.

Anyone who decides to read this book should really look at primary documents first. This work is nothing but complete fiction of an actual event. It twists the characters to fabricate a plot and create drama, completely disregarding the true cause and effect.

Obviously, it is written by a man who is solely driven by the desire to sell a book to a group of white people, thereby undermining the authenticity of history. When one delves deeper into the kind of effects and stereotypes that this man endorses, it becomes evident that it is extremely shameful and despicable.

It is truly disheartening that such low-quality and inaccurate fodder can find its way onto the shelves, potentially误导 readers and distorting their perception of the real events. We should always be vigilant and critical when it comes to the information we consume, especially when it comes to historical accounts.