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The Confessions of Nat Turner

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This article is about the 1967 novel by William Styron. For the Confessions of Nat Turner published in 1831, see Nat Turner's Rebellion § Aftermath.
The Confessions of Nat Turner
First edition cover
AuthorWilliam Styron
LanguageEnglish
PublisherRandom House
Publication date
1967
Publication placeUnited States
Media typePrint (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages480
ISBN0-679-60101-5 (1st ed)
OCLC30069097
813/.54 20
LC ClassPS3569.T9 C6 1994

The Confessions of Nat Turner is a 1968 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by American writer William Styron. Presented as a first-person narrative by historical figure Nat Turner, the novel concerns Nat Turner's Rebellion in Virginia in 1831. It is a fictional retelling based on The Confessions of Nat Turner: The Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Virginia, a first-hand account of Turner's confessions published by a local lawyer, Thomas R. Gray, in 1831.[1]

Time Magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.[2]

Historical background

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The novel is based on an extant document, the "confession" of Turner to his white lawyer Thomas R. Gray.[1] In the historical confessions, Turner claims to have been divinely inspired.

Some scholars believe that mental illness may have driven Nat Turner's actions,[3] while others believed Turner to have been moved by religiosity.[4]

References

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  1. ^ a b Gray, Thomas Ruffin (1831). "The Confessions of Nat Turner" (PDF).
  2. ^ "100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005", Time Magazine, accessed 17 April 2009
  3. ^ Higginson, Thomas Wentworth (2011-11-07). "Nat Turner's Insurrection". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2021-12-03.
  4. ^ Drexler-Dreis, Joseph (2014-11-01). "Nat Turner's Rebellion as a Process of Conversion". Black Theology. 12 (3): 230–250. doi:10.1179/1476994814Z.00000000037. ISSN 1476-9948. S2CID 142767518.

Further reading

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  • Clarke, John Henrik, ed. William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond. Boston: Beacon Press, 1968.
  • Genovese, Eugene D. "The Nat Turner Case", review of William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond, The New York Review of Books, 11.4 (September 12, 1968).
  • Mellard, James M. "This Unquiet Dust: The Problem of History in Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner", Mississippi Quarterly, 36.4 (Fall 1983), pp. 525–43.
  • Ryan, Tim A. "From Tara to Turner: Slavery and Slave Psychologies in American Fiction and History, 1945–1968", Calls and Responses: The American Novel of Slavery since Gone with the Wind. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008.
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