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Five Tales of the Marine Corps
by William Styron
Before writing his memoir of madness, Darkness Visible, William Styron was best known for his ambitious works of fiction – including The Confessions of Nat Turner and Sophie's Choice. Styron also created personal but no less powerful tales based on his real-life experiences as a U.S. Marine. The Suicide Run collects five of these meticulously rendered narratives. One of them – "Elobey, Annobón, and Corisco" – is published here for the first time.
In "Blankenship," written in 1953, Styron draws on his stint as a guard at a stateside military prison at the end of World War II. "Marriott, the Marine" and "The Suicide Run"–which Styron composed in the early 1970s as part of an intended novel that he set aside to write Sophie's Choice – depict the surreal experience of being conscripted a second time, after World War II, to serve in the Korean War. "My Father's House" captures the isolation and frustration of a soldier trying to become a civilian again. In "Elobey, Annobón, and Corisco,"written late in Styron's life, a soldier attempts to exorcise the dread of an approaching battle by daydreaming about far-off islands, visited vicariously through his childhood stamp collection.
Perhaps the last volume from one of literature’s greatest voices, The Suicide Run brings to life the drama, inhumanity, absurdity, and heroism that forever changed the men who served in the Marine Corps.
"Styron's prose is as assured as ever and his knack for character is masterful, but the overall moralizing tone—war is debasement—is both too simple and too political to work in these character-driven stories." - Publishers Weekly
"Taken as a whole, these fragments illuminate their author's obsessions and make the reader wish Styron had completed at least two more novels. Essential reading for the writer's fans; a revelatory footnote for others. " - Kirkus Reviews
"Recommended for readers of serious literary fiction." - Library Journal
This information about The Suicide Run was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
William Styron (1925-2006) , a native of the Virginia Tidewater, was a graduate of Duke University and a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. His books include Lie Down in Darkness, The Long March, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, Sophie’s Choice, This Quiet Dust, Darkness Visible, and A Tidewater Morning. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Howells Medal, the American Book Award, the Légion d’Honneur, and the Witness to Justice Award from the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation. 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.
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