A Man of Letters

Maybe it’s technology, or just the nature of our society today, but we seem to have long lost the art of writing letters. Letters were a way we once touched based with our friends; a way of exchanging ideas and feelings, of sharing the complexity and eccentricity of daily life. It should be no surprise then, that one of our greatest literary lights of the twentieth century, William Styron, author of Lie Down in Darkness, Confession of Nat Turner, Sophie's Choice, and his seminal work on depression, Darkness Visible, should have written a collection of letters that will stand with any of the literary greats. Years after his death, in 2006, Rose Styron, his bride of 53 years has organized and edited the the thousands of letters that would become the Selected Letters of William Styron. My conversation with Rose Styron: