When a white author wrote a slave narrative novel in 1967, black writers were outraged

In 1967, America was waging war, both within and beyond its borders. In the sweltering heat of summer, long held racial tensions and resentments simmered over, and cities burned. Daily, the violence of state power, the bald injustice of white supremacy, and the anger and desperation they had wrought were on frightening display.

Against this backdrop, William Styron, a white writer, penned The Confessions of Nat Turner, a novel written from the point of view of a black slave facing execution. For white and black readers alike, it made quite an impact. The book spent months atop the New York Times Best Sellers list, and netted Styron a Pulitzer in 1968. Time magazine has called it one of the best English-language novels of the last 50 years. But black readers found the book—ostensibly a liberal text meant to highlight the horrors of slavery and advocate for an end to oppression—to be offensive and revealing of liberal white racism’s worst tendencies. During a year of unprecedented racial unrest, Styron’s book, meant to be a unifier, only served to further highlight vast the gulf between the black and white experiences of America.

The real Nat Turner was a slave in Southampton County, Virginia who led an insurrection against white slaveowners in August of 1831. The event holds a unique place in the American imagination. Unlike the stories of everyday resistance among slaves — from singing spirituals to learning to read — which have become hallowed history and part of a feel-good narrative about the triumph of the human will, Nat Turner’s uprising is not internal. It is pointed, directed specifically and exclusively at white people, and it offers a cold, satisfying glimpse of something else entirely, something precise, swift, and savage: retribution.

And it was bloody. In his book The Rebellious Slave: Nat Turner in American Memory, African-American Studies scholar Scott French quotes a military dispatch from neighboring Greensville County after the insurrection that reads, “Between eighty and a hundred of the whites have already been butchered — their heads severed from their bodies.” A mounted volunteer wrote, “We saw several children whose brains were knocked out.” There were other descriptions of entire families chopped up with axes and laying in pieces on their land. In his introductory note, Styron called the event “the only effective, sustained revolt in the annals of Negro history.”

Slaves rising up and turning their tools on their masters was one of the animating fears of plantation life in the antebellum South, so much so that paranoia about this eventuality is inseparable from the condition of bondage itself. Which is to say, Nat Turner and his army were a literal nightmare come to life for white slaveholders, and their impact was lasting and haunting, a cautionary tale. The violence was put down by a white militia, and those who’d participated — along with many others — were put to death. But reflecting on the slaughter on that humid summer day in Virginia, many whites couldn’t help but think: what if it hadn’t been? Predictably, in the aftermath of the rebellion, the treatment of slaves was ever more barbaric.

Stories of slave recalcitrance and rebellion had circulated long before the 1831 uprising, but in the “larger-than-life” figure of Turner specifically, whose memory has been mobilized variously and unevenly for close to two centuries, we can see “America’s search for transcendent meaning in its troubled past,” French writes. “Slaveholders, abolitionists, advocates of black uplift, defenders of white supremacy, New Negroes, New Dealers, civil rights pacifists, Black Power militants — all enlisted Turner, at one time or another, as hero or villain.” Styron’s blockbuster book, written in 1967 precisely as African Americans were again in the midst of armed uprising against this nation’s oppression, was part of this long tradition.

Confessions was conceived on a dare — from James Baldwin, no less. After hearing from Robert Silvers, then an editor at Harper’s working with Baldwin, that “Jimmy” was tired of New York City, Styron invited the writer to stay in his guesthouse in Roxbury, Connecticut. Baldwin lived there for nine months. According to Sam Tanenhaus’s 2016 Vanity Fair piece, “The Literary Battle for Nat Turner’s Legacy,” the two men read and wrote by day and gathered at night, along with Styron’s wife, Rose, to drink Jack Daniel’s, smoke, and talk. Styron was already doing research for the book that would become Confessions, but it was Baldwin who dared him to write it “from inside the character’s own head.”

Styron felt he was humanizing Turner, who had written his confessions prior to his execution in a pamphlet also titled Confessions Of Nat Turner, which appeared in 1831. Perhaps tellingly, Styron felt that the real Turner came across as a “dangerous religious lunatic…a psychopathic monster.” In his depiction of Turner, Styron felt he would capture the complexity of the man’s legacy. The early reception of Confessions, mostly from the white literary establishment, was breathless. Celebrated writers like John Cheever, Richard Yates, Carlos Fuentes, and Wallace Stegner hailed it as a classic. To read the notes written to Styron from prominent authors is, in Tanenhaus’s words, “to enter a kind of literary rapture.” In The New York Times, reviewer Eliot Fremont-Smith called it “cathartic” and “a triumph.”

But praise gave way to criticism, particularly from black writers and thinkers. In 1968, Beacon Press published a collection of essays, William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond. “No event in recent years has touched and stirred the black intellectual community more than this book,” wrote its editor, John Henrik Clarke, a black historian and pioneer of Pan-African Studies. In its pages, some of Styron’s most vociferous critics took aim at the hubris of a white author writing from the perspective of a black slave. Alvin F. Poussaint, a psychologist of race relations, wrote of Styron’s Turner that “all the people he seemed to ‘worship’ were white,” and critiqued a passage in which Turner decides to relieve himself while standing on a deserted plantation: “Now, looking down at the shops and cabins and distant fields, I was no longer the grinning black boy in velvet pantaloons; for a fleeting moment instead I owned all….What a strange, demented ecstasy! How white I was! What wicked joy!”

“Is this really our black protagonist speaking,” Poussaint asked, “or are we witnessing some kind of vicarious and prurient joy which Styron experiences by projecting this type of imagery into the mind of Turner?”

Many attacked Styron’s treatment of Turner’s sexuality, specifically his lust for a virginal young white woman, which was a major theme of the novel. Historian Lerone Bennett, Jr. took Styron to task for “using the white woman as bait,” in “page after page of squirming white buttocks, ‘bare white full round hips’ and ‘milky white legs and arms,’” and others in the volume excoriated Styron for the predatory lustfulness suggested by Turner’s character. That treatment, some asserted, seemed more a projection of white male anxiety than anything grounded in history. Indeed, as Martha Hodes argues in her book White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South, the trope of predatory sexuality among black men toward white women coalesced in the aftermath of the Civil War — a generation after the Nat Turner rebellion — and was likely linked to fears about black freedom. Even prominent black thinkers like Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells noted the appearance of the phenomenon in the second half of the century. For Styron to map a kind of drooling, ultimately violent, black male desire onto a white female subject struck critics as historically inaccurate and simply racist.

The collective critique of William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond ruffled some feathers among white establishment intellectuals, prompting defensive reviews like that of Eugene Genovese, a historian of the south, who wrote in The New York Review of Books, “One might have thought that black and white Americans who are committed to racial equality would approve of the fact that William Styron, a white Southerner, has rescued the great rebel slave leader, Nat Turner, from obscurity.” But no, Genovese went on, complaining of a lack of gratitude and sophistication among readers and defending Styron’s right to artistic expression from any perspective he chose.

In May of 1968, James Baldwin sat down to moderate a debate between Styron and another friend of his, the actor and activist Ossie Davis. Davis was leading a protest against the film version of Confessions, which he called “flagrant libel against one of our greatest heroes.” In his introductory comments, Baldwin claims with his signature casual brilliance that both men are right. “No one can tell a writer what he can and cannot write,” he says, arguing that Styron’s writing was a private act, a “confrontation with his history.” In challenging the film, Ossie was speaking more to the public will to project this fraught, potentially dangerous version of the story into “America’s living room.”

In the end, the film was never made. But the fierce debate around it was yet another flashpoint in America’s increasingly heated reckoning with race. Styron and Davis were fundamentally at odds, and the anguish visible on the streets of American cities the year before — for many, many years before — was an expression of this profound division of experience. It was mirrored in Styron’s cool explication of his belief that his portrait of Turner was considered and humane, and Ossie Davis’s rejoinder that this version of the story — and Styron’s rejection of a real black voice in favor of the white imagination of one — was dangerous, life-threateningly so, for black Americans.

In the years since, Confessions has fallen off college syllabi, as more work by writers of color emerged. It also fell out of favor because Styron failed at writing a black character that grew beyond a projection of white fears and lurid fantasies about blackness. But it’s possible that he could not have done otherwise. His complicity was too deeply entrenched. Perhaps Baldwin’s genius was in forcing him to confront this, in forcing liberal America to confront it. And yet, Nat Turner himself has become a basic part of American history, largely due to the success of Styron’s divisive novelization. The Confessions of Nat Turner became a cultural lightning rod as much as a work of fiction. Like other complicated works of art, it has come to contain more meaning than it could hold.