What with the elections coming up and Britney getting divorced it was easy to miss the passing of a great author.
William Styron died of pneumonia on November 1st at age 81. 

Perhaps you read Lie Down in Darkness, or his Pulitzer-prize winning fictional narrative The Confessions of Nat Turner, or perhaps you saw a  movie called "Sophie's Choice," a screen adaptation of Styron's holocaust novel.

I was grateful for his memoir detailing his descent into clinical depression, Darkness Visible, published in 1990.  That book was a staple for college writing courses in the early '90s.

BookTV (C-SPAN) did a feature on Styron last weekend with extensive interview footage.  Perhaps they'll broadcast it again soon.

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He sounds like an author that would be very interesting to me. "Darkness Visible" seems like something I would like to read, having struggled with depression for a long time. It's such a weird vacuum feeling, to be in that state, and it feels good sometime to see someone express perhaps the very same feelings you have on paper. It touches you. I will certainly look him up, though I admit that I have never heard of him personally, until now. I think when Arthur Miller died I mentioned something about the feeling I get everytime an important writer dies. Each one is loud reminder of the fact that our culture is drifting further toward the banal.

He sounds like an author that would be very interesting to me. "Darkness Visible" seems like something I would like to read, having struggled with depression for a long time. It's such a weird vacuum feeling, to be in that state, and it feels good sometime to see someone express perhaps the very same feelings you have on paper. It touches you. I will certainly look him up, though I admit that I have never heard of him personally, until now. I think when Arthur Miller died I mentioned something about the feeling I get everytime an important writer dies. Each one is loud reminder of the fact that our culture is drifting further toward the banal.

Styron is one of those 20th century authors who sometimes appears on reading lists in high school or college.  Sometimes not.  The movie "Sophie's Choice" was a huge hit.  More people know Styron's work from that screenplay (though not his name) than anything else.  When "Darkness Visible" was published, Styron's popularity had waned.  It had that upsurge in the early '90s with the "Darkness Visible" memoir, but faded again until his death brought his name back into the general buzz.
I do recommend "Darkness Visible."  I'm looking forward to re-reading the fiction I read long ago, and reading the Styron fiction I never got around to.