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Horror of Nat Turner's bloody slave rebellion remains vivid 186 years later

The book that put Nat Turner on the cover of Newsweek magazine in the autumn of 1967 had its origins in the oral and written traditions of Tidewater Virginia. Styron traced his interest in the subject of slavery to the stories his grandmother—who had owned slaves—told him as a child growing up in Newport News. He first read about Nat Turner in a grammar school textbook in the mid-1930s. After reading the original “Confessions” late in the 1940s, Styron began to consider the possibilities of a novel. He gathered source materials and pitched the idea to his editor early in the 1950s. H...

The Confessions of Nat Turner. According to The Confessions, Turner was born into slavery on a Southampton plantation on October 2, 1800. He could read and write, which was unusual for an enslaved person of that time and place, and he owned a Bible. He had a family, including a grandmother to whom he was “much attached”; a father who escaped slavery; and a wife and son, who lived on a neighboring farm. He was deeply religious, “devoting [his] time to fasting and prayer,” and experienced private revelations in which “the Spirit that spoke to the prophets in former days” spoke to ...