The American writer was born in the state of Virginia, not far from the location of Nat Turner's slave rebellion in 1831, which would later inspire one of his best-known and most controversial novels: the Pulitzer Prize-winning Confessions by Nat Turner (1967), narrated by the leader of the revolt.Although his paternal grandparents had been slave owners, his mother, coming from the northern United States, and his father, southern but liberal, gave him a perspective of the race relations unusual in his generation.

Styron is also known for two other novels: Lying in the Dark (1951), written at the age of twenty-five, and the controversial Sophie's Decision (1979), which recreates the Nazi Holocaust through a non-Jewish victim from the camps of concentration. After obtaining the Cino Del Duca World Prize in 1986, the author fell into a deep depression, which he would later relate in his memoirs, That Visible Darkness (1990). Styron died of pneumonia at 81 years of age.