William Styron died Wednesday from pneumonia. He wrote one of my favorite books from college, Sophie’s Choice, about a Holocaust survivor who has to choose between her two children. Terry Gross has an interview with Styron here. It’s was done around the publication of his memoir Darkness Visible, about his battles with depression. Although I don’t agree with him, he makes an articulate if-not-quite-convincing argument that depression should be treated like any other disease of the body.

Styron wrote three major novels in his life (the other two being The Confessions of Nat Turner and Lie Down in Darkness). It’s really a shame. I had always hoped there’d be another book by him before he died. I don’t know how much his depression contributed to him not writing as much toward the end of his life.

The NYTimes wrote an article about him but it’s kind of insulting — it calls his work melodramatic, his prose purple, and his style grandiose. It says one or two nice things too. His work was often misunderstood. People called him racist when The Confessions of Nat Turner came out because they didn’t like that a white Southerner dared to write from the point of view of a black slave. Now a NYTimes writer says a man who wrote about slavery and the Holocaust had some melodramatic tendencies. Interesting …

Or maybe I’m just defensive because I was a melodramatic youngster, and it’s a little disconcerting to think that Sophie’s Choice might not hold up to fully formed adult eyes. But I still remember it being a cleverly structured novel with a story inside of a story and a painful secret in the middle that seemed to hold up metaphorically to the pain of something like the Holocaust. I suppose one person’s pain is another person’s melodrama.