Editing William Styron (section)

==Nat Turner controversy==
Styron's next two novels, published between 1967 and 1979, sparked much controversy. Feeling wounded by his first truly harsh reviews<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://william-styron.com/about/timeline/|title=Timeline │ The Official Webpage about American Author William Styron.|date=August 25, 2018|website=William-Styron.com}}</ref> for ''Set This House on Fire'', Styron spent the years after its publication researching and writing his next novel, the fictitious memoirs of the historical [[Nat Turner|Nathaniel "Nat" Turner]], a slave who led a slave rebellion in 1831.

During the 1960s, Styron became an eyewitness to another time of rebellion in the United States, living and writing at the heart of that turbulent decade, a time highlighted by the [[Counterculture of the 1960s|counterculture revolution]] with its political struggle, civil unrest, and racial tension. The public response to this social upheaval was furious and intense: battle lines were being drawn. In 1968, Styron signed the "[[Writers and Editors War Tax Protest]]" pledge, a vow refusing to pay taxes as a protest against the Vietnam War.<ref>"Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" January 30, 1968 ''New York Post''</ref>

In this atmosphere of dissent, many{{who|date=July 2012}} had criticized Styron's friend James Baldwin for his novel ''[[Another Country (novel)|Another Country]]'', published in 1962. Among the criticisms was outrage over a black author choosing a white woman as the [[protagonist]] in a story that tells of her involvement with a black man. Baldwin was Styron's house guest for several months following the critical storm generated by ''Another Country''. During that time, he read early drafts of Styron's new novel, and predicted that Styron's book would face even harsher scrutiny than ''Another Country''. "Bill's going to catch it from both sides", he told an interviewer immediately following the 1967 publication of ''[[The Confessions of Nat Turner]]''.

Baldwin's prediction was correct, and despite public defenses of Styron by leading artists of the time, including Baldwin and [[Ralph Ellison]], numerous other black critics reviled Styron's portrayal of Turner as racist stereotyping. The historian and critic [[John Henrik Clarke]] edited and contributed to a polemical anthology, ''William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond'', published in 1968 by Beacon Press. Particularly controversial was a passage in which Turner fantasizes about [[rape|raping]] a white woman. Several critics pointed to this as a dangerous perpetuation of a traditional Southern justification for [[lynching]]. Styron also writes of a situation where Turner and another slave boy have a homosexual encounter while alone in the woods.  Despite the controversy, the novel was a runaway critical and financial success, and won both the 1968 [[Pulitzer Prize for Fiction]]<ref>[https://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Nat-Turner-Vintage-Classic/dp/0099285568 ''Confessions of Nat Turner''], Amazon.com</ref> and the [[William Dean Howells Medal]] in 1970.