6/28/2023 0 Comments Darkness Visible by William Styron![]() The academic research on mental illness at the time was relatively comprehensive, but no one to date had offered the kind of report that Styron gave to the public: a firsthand account of what it’s like to have the monstrous condition overtake you. ![]() Styron may have been startled by the outpouring of mail, but in many ways, it’s easy to understand. “I had not really realized that it was going to touch that kind of a nerve.” It was just by the thousands that the letters came in,” he told Charlie Rose. By the author’s own acknowledgement, the response from readers was unprecedented. ![]() A few months later, he released the essay as a book, augmenting the article with a recollection of when the illness first took hold of him: in Paris, as he was about to accept the 1985 Prix mondial Cino Del Duca, the French literary award. ![]() The piece revealed in unsparing detail how Styron’s lifelong melancholy at once gave way to a seductive urge to end his own life. Twenty-five years ago, in December, 1989, Darkness Visible, William Styron’s account of his descent into the depths of clinical depression and back, appeared in Vanity Fair. ![]()
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