William Styron and The Southampton Insurrection

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M UCH of the controversy over Confessions of Nat Turner in I967 and i968 concerned William Styron's alleged distortion of historical in the novel. Many important critics, black and white, added fuel to the racial fires that surrounded Styron's book. Most of them took up the tired debate over historical fact versus imaginative fiction, and in some of their writings they unfortunately engaged in nasty guessing games about Styron's motives for distorting the historical record. Nat Turner became an extraliterary event-a moral and political issue on which critics and reviewers could take sides. As Richard Gilman points out, The book was immediately swept up into areas of power and influence wholly outside its existence as literature, and, even more crucially, before such existence could even be brought into question. 1 Given this background, it is surprising to discover that Styron's known historical sources for the novel have not been investigated in any systematic way. In interviews and public appearances Styron has made no secret of the that he relied heavily, for information and detail, on specific books about slavery and the antebellum South. To date, however, no one has followed Styron's leads.2 This article utilizes an important document-Styron's annotated copy of Southampton Insurrection-to uncover specific details that he borrowed for his novel. article also demonstrates that Styron