Summary
Published during the political and racial turmoil of the 1960s, THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER is a fictionalized version of the written documents of a man who led a slave rebellion in Virginia in 1831. As Styron wrote at the time, "Had perfect accuracy been my aim I would have written a work of history rather than a novel." His controversial novel is the tragic story of the effects of oppression on a man's inherent goodness and decency.
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Media Reviews
"This is a first-rate novel...and the best by an American writer that has appeared in some years...Styron maintains throughout his narrative a consistent and highly imaginative realism not only on the object plane, but also by recreating the intimate psychology of his characters...In a way inconceivable, even for Faulkner, Styron's prose master." -- Philip Rahv
-- New York Review of Books
"Styron has freely, with luxurious imagination, reconstructed Nat Turner's life from the 20-page confession to the court that then had him hanged...The real achievement of this beautiful, curious, essentially dreamlike narrative is [that Styron] has been able to create with his honest sense of the tragic, a man whom the locked-up force of daily, hourly, constant suppression has turned into a Stranger-someone who remains single, separate, wholly other from ourselves and our notions...What we have here is a wonderfully evocative portrait of a gifted, proud, long-suppressed human being who began to live only when he was sentenced to die." -- Alfred Kazin
-- Book World
"He has begun the common history-ours." -- James Baldwin
"Alas, what Negroes will find in Styron's 'confessions' is much the same old failure of sensibility that plagues most other fiction about black people. That is to say, they will all find a Nat Turner whom many white people may accept at a safe distance, but hardly one with whom Negroes will easily identify." -- Albert Murray
-- New Leader
"The question is not whether Styron has a right to use alien experiences but whether his novel proves that he knows what he is writing about. In this instance, the overriding answer is yes." -- Paul Gray
-- Time
"[T]he most profound fictional treatment of slavery in our literature." -- C. Vann Woodward
-- New Republic
"I don't know if the book tells the literal truth about Nat Turner, but for me that's beside the point. It is an extraordinary story of a fight for justice, of how honor and mercy destroyed can come to life again." -- Mary Gaitskill
-- Salon
Bibliographic Details
Publisher: Random House Inc
Published date: 2002
Edition: 2nd edition
Size: 6 x 8.5 inches
Weight: 1.25 pounds
Pages: 428
Publisher's Notes
A special anniversary edition of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel based on the real-life story of an abortive slave rebellion in 1831 gives a chilling account of a noble man's moral decline.
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