From Library Journal
Styron's 1967 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel depicting the leader of a slave revolt is the latest offering in Random's "Modern Library." This is the least expensive hardcover edition of Turner currently available.Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Book Description
In the late summer of 1831, in a remote section of southeastern Virginia, there took place the only effective, sustained revolt in the annals of American Negro slavery...

The revolt was led by a remarkable Negro preacher named Nat Turner, an educated slave who felt himself divinely ordained to annihilate all the white people in the region.

The Confessions of Nat Turner is narrated by Nat himself as he lingers in jail through the cold autumnal days before his execution. The compelling story ranges over the whole of Nat's Life, reaching its inevitable and shattering climax that bloody day in August.

The Confessions of Nat Turner is not only a masterpiece of storytelling; is also reveals in unforgettable human terms the agonizing essence of Negro slavery. Through the mind of a slave, Willie Styron has re-created a catastrophic event, and dramatized the intermingled miseries, frustrations--and hopes--which caused this extraordinary black man to rise up out of the early mists of our history and strike down those who held his people in bondage.


Download Description
Powerful, prize-winning 1967 novel depicts the odyssey of Nat Turner, leader of first slave revolt in the US. Styron's novel was profoundly controversial; some felt that's a white author had no right to the subject matter. By the acclaimed author of SOP


From the Publisher
12 1.5-hour cassettes


From the Inside Flap
In the late summer of 1831, in a remote section of southeastern Virginia, there took place the only effective, sustained revolt in the annals of American Negro slavery...

The revolt was led by a remarkable Negro preacher named Nat Turner, an educated slave who felt himself divinely ordained to annihilate all the white people in the region.

The Confessions of Nat Turner is narrated by Nat himself as he lingers in jail through the cold autumnal days before his execution. The compelling story ranges over the whole of Nat's Life, reaching its inevitable and shattering climax that bloody day in August.

The Confessions of Nat Turner is not only a masterpiece of storytelling; is also reveals in unforgettable human terms the agonizing essence of Negro slavery. Through the mind of a slave, Willie Styron has re-created a catastrophic event, and dramatized the intermingled miseries, frustrations--and hopes--which caused this extraordinary black man to rise up out of the early mists of our history and strike down those who held his people in bondage.


About the Author
William Styron was born in Newport News, Virginia in 1928.  After graduating from Duke University in 1947, he lived in Paris as part of the American expatriate community. He also served as advisory editor to the "Paris Review."

Styron's novels include, Lie Down in Darkness (1951); The Long March (1956); Set This House on Fire (1960); and The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), the Pulitzer prize-winning novel based on Turner's own testimony of the bloodiest black slave rebellion  he led in Virginia in 1831. A Tidewater Morning, three tales about a boy growing up in a Virginian tidewater town, was published in 1993.

His non-fiction work includes This Quiet Dust (1982), a collection of essays; and Darkness Visible (1990), a haunting account of his struggle against depression.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Turner's Rebellion took place in the long hot summer of 1831, in the state of Virginia. When it was over, 59 white people were dead; the insurgents were rounded up and either hanged or worse; and Nat Turner, a preacher, confessed to his part in the only effective revolt in the annals of American Negro slavery.

In his introduction of this Pulitzer Prize winner, Styron says "it has been my own intention to try to re-create a man and his era, and to produce a work that is less an historical novel in conventional terms than a meditation on history."

SYNOPSIS

Few modern American novelists have dared as much as William Styron in writing The Confessions of Nat Turner. A white man and a Tidewater Virginian by birth, Styron put himself inside the life and mind of Nat Turner, the black man who led a slave rebellion in Virginia in 1831.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal