The Confessions of Nat Turner

The Confessions of Nat Turner

Pulitzer Prize Winner

Paperback

Award Winner

November 10, 1992 | ISBN 9780679736639

About the Book

The story that inspired the major motion picture The Birth of a Nation (2016)

In the late summer of 1831, in a remote section of southeastern Virginia, there took place the only effective, sustained revolt in the annals of American Negro slavery...

The revolt was led by a remarkable Negro preacher named Nat Turner, an educated slave who felt himself divinely ordained to annihilate all the white people in the region.

The Confessions of Nat Turner is narrated by Nat himself as he lingers in jail through the cold autumnal days before his execution. The compelling story ranges over the whole of Nat's Life, reaching its inevitable and shattering climax that bloody day in August.

The Confessions of Nat Turner is not only a masterpiece of storytelling; is also reveals in unforgettable human terms the agonizing essence of Negro slavery. Through the mind of a slave, Willie Styron has re-created a catastrophic event, and dramatized the intermingled miseries, frustrations--and hopes--which caused this extraordinary black man to rise up out of the early mists of our history and strike down those who held his people in bondage.
Read more
Close

Vintage International Series

Of Human Bondage
If Beale Street Could Talk (Deluxe Edition)
Go Tell It on the Mountain (Deluxe Edition)
Answered Prayers
The Rainbow
Caligula and Three Other Plays
Mosquitoes
Soldiers' Pay
Out (Special Edition)
Antiquities and Other Stories
View more

About the Author

William Styron
William Styron (1925–2006), a native of the Virginia Tidewater, was a graduate of Duke University and a veteran of the US Marine Corps. His books include The Confessions of Nat Turner, Sophie’s Choice, and Darkness Visible. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the William Dean Howells Medal, the American Book Award, the Witness to Justice Award from the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation, and the Légion d’Honneur. With his wife, the poet and activist Rose Styron, he lived for most of his adult life in Roxbury, Connecticut, and in Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts, where he is buried. More by William Styron
Decorative Carat