Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #216496 in Books
• Published on: 2004-07-01
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

Synopsis
In 1831 Nat Turner awaits death in a Virginia jail cell. He is a slave, a preacher, and the leader of the only effective slave revolt in the history of 'that peculiar institution'. William Styron's ambitious and stunningly accomplished novel is Turner's confession, made to his jailers under the duress of his God. Encompasses the betrayals, cruelties and humiliations that made up slavery - and that still sear the collective psyches of both races.

From the Publisher
A first-person narrative that depicts a good man's transformation into an avenging angel

About the Author
Born at Newport News, Virginia, in 1925, William Styron was educated at Duke University. He served in the Marine Corps during the last war, and was recalled to service during the Korean War. After 1952, he lived mainly in Europe, before settling in a rural part of Connecticut.

Customer Reviews

A unique book which takes you into the soul of a slave.
This work, steeped in accurate historical settings and moving religious allegories, takes the reader into the very core of a southern slave.

Slavery breeds violence, violence breeds slavery.
Written in 1968, Styron's "Confessions" delves deep into the psychology behind Nat Turner's 1831 slave revolt. Almost unbearable in its graphic violence and Biblically-dimensioned heartbreak, the novel (for it *is* fictional) has Turner telling the whole story in painfully honest detail. Styron neither defends Turner nor paints him as crazy; he is less interested in pointing out right or wrong than in trying to understand the broad ironies of the system of slavery and its effects on the people who ran it and were subject to it. Styron's Nat Turner is a man who is both educated and destroyed by his masters; he is both uplifted and misled by the Bible. His hatred is not fueled by the hatred of whites, but by the pity of whites. And when he kills, he is only able to commit one physical murder, though he takes responsibility for 60. The book is often painful to read, especially for one who might think that race relations today have little to do with 19th-century slavery. But in its wealth of detail and its ability to enter into the mind of a complex and criminal mind, it is unique, and should be required reading for every self-termed patriotic American.