Stingo, a young southerner, who journeyed north in 1947 to become a writer becomes intellectually and emotionally entanglement with his neighbors in a Brooklyn rooming house. Nathan, a tortured, brilliant Jew, and his lover, Sophie, a beautiful Polish woman whose wrist bears the grim tattoo of a concentration camp ... and whose past is strewn with death that she alone survived.

A Virginia couple separated by hatred and self-pity attend the burial of their daughter.

In these stories - never before published in book form - William Styron focuses his unmatched talents on matters that have preoccupied him during much of his adult writing career. Although their immediate subjects are different - a young Marine about to invade Japan in World War II remembers the role his father played in building one of the ships; a child recalls what happened when a former slave came home to die in the place where he was born; a...

Styron's provocative anti-war novel: The story of two marine reservists' rejection of the forced conformity of the military machine. In the shadow of the Korean War, a series of misfired mortar shells kill six men in a marine camp during a training exercise, prompting the commanding officer to order a grueling punishment: a thirty-six mile march through the suffocating heat of the Carolina summer. Intended to beat discipline into the aging reservists,...

Diamond Head, Hawaii, 1941. Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt is a champion welterweight and a fine bugler. But when he refuses to join the company's boxing team, he gets "the treatment" that may break him or kill him. First Sgt. Milton Anthony Warden knows how to soldier better than almost anyone, yet he's risking his career to have an affair with the commanding officer's wife. Both Warden and Prewitt are bound by a common bond: the Army is their heart...

These recordings of twentieth-century American authors interpreting their own works were highly praised when first released in the 1960s. Today the cultural and historical value of these recordings makes them an essential part of our literary heritage.