'Fess Up

"It was a risky, even provocative book—he’d always known it would be—but the gamble appeared to have paid off. 'The Confessions' got excellent reviews, appeared on the best-seller list, was sold to 20th Century Fox and won a Pulitzer Prize. Best of all, Styron said, was the response from many African-Americans. Later in life (Styron died in 2006) he recalled traveling to a historically black college to receive an honorary degree shortly after 'The Confessions' was published: 'I felt gratitude at their acceptance of me,' he wrote, 'and, somehow more important, at my acceptance of them, as if my literary labors and my plunge into history had helped dissolve many of my preconceptions about race that had been my birthright as a Southerner.'
"And then history intervened."

Jess Row in The New York Times looks back at the controversy forty years ago over William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner.