A lifelong liberal, Styron was involved in many public causes, from supporting a Connecticut teacher suspended for refusing to say the oath of allegiance, to advocating human rights for Jews in the Soviet Union. In the 90s, he was one of a group of authors and historians who successfully opposed plans for a Disney theme park near the Manassas National Battlefield in northern Virginia.
Styron found writing an increasing struggle in his latter years. He was reportedly working on a military novel, yet published no full-length work of fiction after Sophie's Choice, which came out in 1979. He remained well-connected, however, socialising with President Clinton in Martha's Vineyard, and joining Arthur Miller and Gabriel Garcia Marquez on a delegation that met with Cuban leader Fidel Castro in 2000.
The son of a shipbuilder, Styron was born in Newport News, Virginia, to a family whose history extended to colonial Virginia. He was awed by the fiction of fellow southerner Thomas Wolfe, and knew by his late teens that he wanted to be a writer. His own life offered strong material. At age 13, his mother died, transforming him into a 'hell-raiser' with an unhealable wound of guilt. He served as a lieutenant in the US marines during the second world war and was stationed in Okinawa in 1945.
'Some of my problems I think came from a continuing anguish over my mother's death. If I had gotten shot it would have been, I suppose, some kind of completion. It's hard to say how that would have worked out,' Styron told the Associated Press in a 1990 interview. 'When I was a young marine platoon leader, there was this incredible sense of fate. The myth at that age is you're going to live forever. Well, I never believed that and my friends didn't. I thought I was going to die."
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