Darkness Visible by William Styron

Darkness Visible by William Styron

A reissue of the tour de force by the Nobel laureate that is a vision of elemental reality so vivid we seem to hallucinate the scenes (The New York Times Book Review). It opens during the London blitz, when a naked child steps out of an all-consuming fire; that child, Matty, becomes a wanderer and a seeker. Two more lost children await him, twins as exquisite as they are loveless. In a final conflagration, William Golding's book lights up both the inner and outer darknesses of our time.

William Styron is the author The Confessions of Nat Turner, Sophie's Choice, and Lie Down in Darkness (winner of the Prix de Rome when published in 1951) and Darkness Visible. The author is a graduate of Duke University (1947), where his papers are housed at the Duke University Library. He currently lives in Roxbury, Connecticut, and Martha's Vineyard.

James L. W. West III is Distinguished Professor of English at The Pennsylvania State University. He is at work on an edition of Theodore Dreiser's Jennie Gerhardt and on the authorized biography of William Styron.