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    Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness

    3.7 28

    by William Styron

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    • ISBN-13: 9780679736394
    • Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
    • Publication date: 01/28/1992
    • Pages: 96
    • Sales rank: 43,103
    • Product dimensions: 5.20(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.40(d)

    One of the great writers of the generation succeeding that of Hemingway and Faulkner, William Styron is renowned for the elegance of his prose and his powerful moral engagement. His books include Lie Down in Darkness, The Long March, The Confessions of Nat Turner, Sophie's Choice, This Quiet Dust, and Darkness Visible. He has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the American Book Award, the Howells Medal, and the Edward MacDowell Medal.

    Author biography courtesy of Random House, Inc.

    Brief Biography

    Hometown:
    Roxbury, Connecticut, and Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts
    Date of Birth:
    June 11, 1925
    Date of Death:
    November 1, 2006
    Place of Birth:
    Newport News, Virginia
    Place of Death:
    Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts
    Education:
    Davidson College and Duke University, both in North Carolina; courses at the New School for Social Research in New York
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    A work of great personal courage and a literary tour de force, this bestseller is Styron's true account of his descent into a crippling and almost suicidal depression. Styron is perhaps the first writer to convey the full terror of depression's psychic landscape, as well as the illuminating path to recovery.

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    Authors, American->Biography
    Styron, William (1925-2006)->Biography
    Biography
    Self-Help & Relationships
    Literary Biography
    Self-Improvement
    Medical Figures & Patient Narratives
    American Literary Biography
    Psychological Self-Help
    Patient Narratives
    Depression & Mood Disorders
    Mental/Psychological Disorder Patients - Biography
    Other American Authors - Literary Biography
    20th Century American Authors - Literary Biography
    Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
    A meditation on Styron's ( Sophie's Choice ) serious depression at the age of 60, this essay evokes with detachment and dignity the months-long turmoil whose symptoms included the novelist's ``dank joylessness,'' insomnia, physical aversion to alcohol (previously ``an invaluable senior partner of my intellect'') and his persistent ``fantasies of self-destruction'' leading to psychiatric treatment and hospitalization. The book's virtues--considerable--are twofold. First, it is a pitiless and chastened record of a nearly fatal human trial far commoner than assumed--and then a literary discourse on the ways and means of our cultural discontents, observed in the figures of poet Randall Jarrell, activist Abbie Hoffman, writer Albert Camus and others. Written by one whose book-learning proves a match for his misery, the memoir travels fastidiously over perilous ground, receiving intimations of mortality and reckoning delicately with them. Always clarifying his demons, never succumbing to them in his prose, Styron's neat, tight narrative carries the bemusement of the worldly wise suddenly set off-course--and the hard-won wisdom therein. In abridged form, the essay first appeared in Vanity Fair. (Sept.)
    Library Journal
    Nearly 40 years ago, Styron published his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness , which revolved around the suicide of a young woman, Peyton Loftis. Now, he tells the short but very moving story of the deep depression which nearly overcame him in the summer of 1984. A successful middle-aged writer at the peak of his powers and acclaim, Styron was--seemingly inexplicably--struck by insomnia and a growing sense of malaise leading to hopelessness. He consulted a psychiatrist and was given high doses of the controversial drug Halcion for his insomnia, but his despair continued to increase until one evening he actually attempted suicide, only to be rescued by the playing of Brahms's Alto Rhapsody in a video he was watching. He immediately had himself hospitalized, and after several weeks in the security and healing atmosphere of the hospital began to feel himself again. Expanded from a 1989 Vanity Fair article, this book is highly recommended. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/90.-- Marcia G. Fuchs, Guilford Free Lib., Ct.

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