Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2001. [Vol. 7.] Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 27)

Studies - László Dányi: The Eccentric Against the Mainstream: William Styron, 75

usually argue by considering a certain period of the writer's life, for example when he travelled to France, where he founded the Paris Review, and where he established his reputation as an American writer whose stature has been esteemed as highly as that of Victor Hugo, Balzac and Flaubert. Valarie Meliotes Arms writes the following about those years in the author's life: He was pilloried at home when his third novel seemed to forsake the southern tradition, but abroad he was accepted as a serious writer. Gallimard published Set This House on Fire and reissued Lie Down in Darkness. The existential trappings of French philosophers, the intricate plot and well-developed characters made Set This House on Fire quite popular in France. (Arms 48) While he received acclaim for his Set This House on Fire in France, in America Styron's decision to live and to write outside the South has perhaps fueled critical disagreement over how closely his fiction should be linked to a regional context. In spite of the diversity of critical approaches to Styron's content and form, when trying to define Styron's place in contemporary fiction I share Zoltán Abádi-Nagy's opinion. His appreciation delineates the writer's oeuvre in relation to the multitude of influences that affected his writing. The critic concludes that Styron's style and mode of writing can be characterized by the traditional realistic approach to characterization traced in the works of Bellow, Malamud, Roth and Updike. He is an innovator of form concerning time-, perspective- and consciousness-techniques, and he inherited a lot from modernism and the stout representatives of Southern literature: Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe and Robert Penn Warren (Abádi 490). Although I accept that in most cases what an author confesses about the way he writes, or why he writes, or why he employs certain elements in his work, or when he explains the meaning of his works is not a trustworthy clue to grasp the meaning of, or to interpret an author's oeuvre, a brief recollection of what Styron thinks about his art might provide a more shaded picture of his art. In a TV interview William Styron himself mentioned William Blackburn and Hiram Hayden as those two people who had had a great impact on his career by giving him advice, and the latter one by encouraging him to turn 14