Havanas in Camelot: Personal Essays » (Reprint)

Whether fictionalizing a slave uprising in The Confessions of Nat Turner or breaking the silence on clinical depression, William Styron's work inspired not only accolades but national dialogues.

After the great success in 1990 of Darkness Visible, his memoir of depression and recovery, William Styron wrote more frequently in an introspective, autobiographical mode. Havanas in Camelot brings together fourteen of his personal essays, including a reminiscence of his brief friendship with John F. Kennedy; a recollection of the power and ceremony on display at the inauguration of François Mitterrand; memoirs of Truman Capote, James Baldwin, and Terry Southern; a meditation on Mark Twain; an account of Styron’s daily walks with his dog; and an evocation of his summer home on Martha’s Vineyard.

Styron’s essays touch on the great themes of his fiction–racial oppression, slavery, and the Holocaust–but for the most part they address other subjects: bowdlerizations of history, literary lists, childhood moviegoing, the censoring of his own work, and the pursuit of celebrity fetish objects.

These essays, which reveal a reflective and humorous side of Styron’s nature, make possible a fuller assessment of this enigmatic man of American letters.

The Barnes & Noble Review

I was born 60 miles down the road and 40 years after William Styron into a world remarkably unchanged. Jim Crow had been legally abolished in Virginia, but maiden aunts still pointed out with solemn reverence the weed-like Confederate violets that straggled across the yard At eight, I memorized rebel victories and had a Confederate flag hanging in my bedroom.

Publisher's Note     vii
Havanas in Camelot     3
A Case of the Great Pox     19
"I'll Have to Ask Indianapolis-"     65
Les Amis du President     81
Celebrating Capote     89
Jimmy in the House     95
Transcontinental with Tex     103
A Literary Forefather     121
Slavery's Pain, Disney's Gain     127
Too Late for Conversion or Prayer     133
Moviegoer     139
Fessing Up     145
Walking with Aquinnah     151
"In Vineyard Haven"     159