Where to start with William Styron

American novelist, 1925–2006. Won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1980 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1968.

Best William Styron book to start with: Sophie's Choice (1979), on 3 of the 17 lists it could have made.

Sophie’s Choice is the book to begin with. It won the National Book Award in 1980. A young Southern writer in Brooklyn in 1947 befriends a Polish woman and her volatile lover and slowly learns what she carries. It is long and its subject is terrible, but the warmth of the narrator keeps it readable.

The Confessions of Nat Turner won the Pulitzer Prize in 1968. It is a first-person novel based on the real slave rebellion in Virginia in 1831, and it has been debated ever since for its decision to speak in the voice of a real enslaved man. Read it with that in mind.

Lie Down in Darkness, shortlisted for the National Book Award in 1952, is his first novel, about a Virginia family. It is the one to try if you want him on a smaller scale.