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Personal Essays
Random House
April 2008
On Sale: April 8, 2008
176 pages ISBN: 1400067197 EAN: 9781400067190 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
After the great success in 1990 of Darkness Visible, his
memoir of depression and recovery, William Styron wrote
more frequently in an introspective, autobiographical mode.
Havanas in Camelot brings together fourteen of his personal
essays, including a reminiscence of his brief friendship
with John F. Kennedy; a recollection of the power and
ceremony on display at the inauguration of François
Mitterrand; memoirs of Truman Capote, James Baldwin, and
Terry Southern; a meditation on Mark Twain; an account of
Styron’s daily walks with his dog; and an evocation of his
summer home on Martha’s Vineyard. Styron’s essays touch on the great themes of his fiction–
racial oppression, slavery, and the Holocaust–but for the
most part they address other subjects: bowdlerizations of
history, literary lists, childhood moviegoing, the
censoring of his own work, and the pursuit of celebrity
fetish objects. These essays, which reveal a reflective and humorous side
of Styron’s nature, make possible a fuller assessment of
this enigmatic man of American letters.
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