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November 02, 2006

WILLIAM STYRON DIES

William Styron, the author of the novels Sophie's Choice and The Confessions of Nat Turner and the memoir of depression Darkness Visible, has died at 81.

Styronw Although he was often cited along with Vonnegut and Norman Mailer as a leading writer of his generation, he produced little over the past 15 years. Styron 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 did remain well connected, whether socializing with President Clinton on Martha's Vineyard or joining Arthur Miller and Gabriel Garcia Marquez on a delegation that met with Cuban leader Fidel Castro in 2000.

"He was always generous to me as a younger writer," said E.L. Doctorow, who, like Styron, has been published for decades by Random House. "He stood in my mind as a sort of writerly presence, an iconic Southern writer."

For more on Styron, you can visit:

* His Paris Review interview.

* His American Masters page, which includes a two-minute video clip.

* An NEH interview with Styron.

* Links to his New York Review of Books contributions.

* An audio interview from CBS Radio.

* An excerpt from Sophie's Choice.

Posted at 12:30 AM in Obit |

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

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