The Confessions of Nat Turner
by William Styron
Summary
Nat Turner is in a cell in Jerusalem, Virginia, in November 1831, waiting to be hanged, and he tells the story himself. He was born into slavery in Southampton County, taught to read by an owner who declared him a prodigy and promised him freedom, and passed down through a series of hands as that promise quietly evaporated. He became a preacher. He read the Bible until it told him what to do. In August 1831 he led a band of followers through the county for two days, killing about sixty white people, most of them women and children, before the militia broke them.
Styron's Turner is intelligent, sexually frustrated, contemptuous of the men he leads, and appalled by what his own rebellion becomes. The one killing he performs himself is of Margaret Whitehead, a girl who liked him, and the novel makes her death its emotional centre.
The writing is dense, formal and heavily cadenced, closer to the King James Bible than to any recorded speech of the period, and the reader is inside that voice for four hundred pages with no relief from it.
This is a powerful book and a contested one, and there is no reading it now without the argument attached: a white novelist wrote the interior life of the most famous enslaved rebel in American history, working from a document the man's own jailer produced.
Best for readers prepared to read the criticism alongside it. Taken on its own it will mislead you about the history.
Historical Context & Significance
The Confessions of Nat Turner won the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was a bestseller, and within months it had become the most publicly disputed American novel of its decade.
Styron's source was a pamphlet published in 1831 by Thomas R. Gray, the white lawyer who interviewed Turner in jail, and scholars still disagree about how much of Turner is in it. Styron departed from the record besides, giving Turner a fixation on a white girl and no wife, though a wife is documented.
In 1968 Beacon Press published William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond, edited by John Henrik Clarke, with essays by Lerone Bennett Jr, John Oliver Killens, Alvin Poussaint and John A. Williams among others, objecting to a Turner who hesitates and bungles and to the sexual material. James Baldwin and the historian Eugene Genovese defended the book. A planned film was abandoned. The novel is now generally taught alongside that response rather than by itself.