And the animating impulse for much of Nat Turner's behavior and Styron’s book is a psycho sexual obsession with white women," Asim said. “Thomas Gray's confession is really a skeletal document that Styron attempted to put some flesh on. Styron’s novel is interpreted from the notes of the white lawyer, Thomas Gray, noted Asim, a creative writing professor at Emerson College and author of a forthcoming book on Turner and Styron. I think just on a fundamental level we could never take such confessions seriously,” Asim said. “It's a confession supposedly given by an African American while in police custody.
The original confessions were distortions of Nat Turner's voice, but Turner is in there somewhere.”īut where he was, literally, at the time of the confession is the reason writer Jabari Asim considers Styron’s interpretation of Turner’s history to be so untrustworthy. “Those confessions were copied down by a white lawyer someone who, in fact, hated him. “He's different from almost every other person who rebelled against slavery, because unlike the others he left an interesting document, which was published as 'The Confessions of Nat Turner,'" Greenberg said. Kenneth Greenberg, a history professor and a scholar of American slavery at Suffolk University, said it is neccesary to understand the circumstances that led to the slave rebellion of 1831 and the man who led it, Nat Turner.
Their criticisms were encapsulated in a book published in Boston titled “ William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond.” The year was 1968, but the literary battle over the legacy of Nat Turner continues. The 1967 novel focusing on a visionary who led the most effective and lethal slave rebellion in American history won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, which a group of black intellectuals said it did not deserve. To call William Styron’s " The Confessions of Nat Turner" and the response to it a seminal event would be understating its impact.
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