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William Styron, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "The Confessions of Nat Turner" and "Sophie's Choice," was one of the literary giants of a post-World War II generation that included Norman Mailer, James Jones and George Plimpton.

Styron spent much of his literary life attempting to understand humankind's capacity to do evil. A descendant of slave owners, he confronted the horrors of slavery in "Nat Turner" by writing in the first-person voice of the leader of a slave rebellion. In "Sophie's Choice," he wrote about the nightmare of the Holocaust.

ALEXA WELCH EDLUND/Associated Press (ENLARGE)
The Virginia-born author fought depression much of his life. He died Wednesday of pneumonia after years of illness.
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THE BEST OF STYRON Lie Down in Darkness (1951). Depression haunted William Styron's fiction as relentlessly as it did his life. In the opening scene of his first novel, a young woman returns in her coffin by train to Virginia, the victim of suicide. "Always remember where you came from," Styron wrote, "the ground is bloody and full of guilt where you were born and you must tread a long narrow path toward your destiny." The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967). The author's most critically lauded novel — narrated by the leader of a slave revolt as he awaits his execution — is a mainstay on high school reading lists and a reliable lightning rod for discussion about race relations. Sophie's Choice (1979). Styron's harrowing story of a Holocaust survivor and her lover was made into a film starring a young Meryl Streep. In one particularly affecting scene in the novel, Styron's heroine takes to her darkened room for several days, paralyzed by depression. Years later, while coming to grips with his own depression, Styron recognized the authenticity of his character's suffering. Darkness Visible (1990). Styron's "memoir of madness" was an unvarnished, masterfully detached exploration of his own despair. "In Paris on a chilly evening late in October of 1985," he began, "I first became aware that the struggle with the disorder in my mind ... might have a fatal outcome." — Teresa K. Weaver

Styron, who died Wednesday of pneumonia at age 81, suffered his own form of enslavement as the victim of undiagnosed clinical depression.

"He endured long periods of inability to write," according to his biographer, James L.W. West III. "So it's all the more remarkable that he did produce the body of work that he did."

In April 2004, Styron joined his old friends — and fellow depressives — Mike Wallace and Art Buchwald at an Atlanta mental health treatment facility for a private panel discussion they billed as "An Evening With the Blues Brothers."

Styron wasn't doing much writing at the time, he said: "I've been sidetracked by this illness."

Born and raised in Newport News, Va., Styron lost his mother at age 14 and was shipped off to boarding school. After graduation, he briefly attended Davidson College in North Carolina but quit to join the Marines when World War II began. He shipped out to the Pacific after completing officer training and was in one of the outfits preparing to invade mainland Japan when the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

After returning home, Styron enrolled at Duke University and immersed himself in the works of William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

He headed north after graduation and worked for a short time as an editor at McGraw-Hill. He hated the job and was soon dismissed, relying on his father to support him while he wrote a novel about Peyton Loftis, a young Southern woman who commits suicide.

Critics lauded that first novel, "Lie Down in Darkness" (1951); some even proclaimed Styron the successor to Faulkner. Styron's biographer, though, detected more of an influence by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

"Even when he was writing 'Lie Down in Darkness,' he was seeking to free himself from Faulkner's spell," West said. "Styron could have been a skilled novelist of manners like Fitzgerald, but he wanted to tackle larger social and philosophical issues. And he wanted to avoid being labeled a Southern author."

Styron was recalled to duty in the Korean War and then moved to Paris, where he helped friends George Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen launch the Paris Review, a literary magazine.

Also in Paris, Styron met and married Rose Burgunder, a published poet, and wrote "The Long March" (1953), a novella set in a Marine Corps camp during the Korean War. Returning to the United States in 1954, Styron and his wife lived for a short time in New York City before settling in Connecticut.

In 1967, Styron completed "The Confessions of Nat Turner," his most acclaimed and most controversial novel. He intended the book as a step toward reconciliation between the races, he said, but the novel's publication at the peak of the black power movement drew harsh criticism from African-American writers. The book won the Pulitzer Prize, but Styron said he never got over the hurtful responses from many black peers.

Styron's preoccupation with slavery and its evils led him to write "Sophie's Choice" (1979), a novel about the Nazi concentration camps. Later made into a film starring Meryl Streep, the novel is the story of Stingo, a young Virginia writer, and his relationship with Sophie, a Polish gentile survivor of the Holocaust, and her tormented Jewish lover.

"The beginning of the novel was basically autobiographical," Styron said. "I did go to Brooklyn and met a young woman named Sophie who was a survivor of Auschwitz. ... All the rest of the details, the choice itself, was imagined."

Styron went on to publish "Darkness Visible" (1990), a memoir of his struggles with depression, and "A Tidewater Morning" (1993), a collection of three interconnected stories. For the last years of his life, he struggled to finish a novel set in World War II.

Never as prolific or self-promoting as Norman Mailer and some of his other contemporaries, Styron failed to achieve true celebrity status outside literary circles.

"Writers are not measured by the volume but by the sustained high quality of their writing," biographer West said. "And his writing is really remarkable. ... I don't think anyone in this generation has produced anything the equal of 'Sophie's Choice.' "