Third

Amer­i­ca lost more than it real­ized today. Sty­ron was, of course, appre­ci­at­ed by a great num­ber of writ­ers, read­ers, and crit­ics. But, these days, he isn’t usu­al­ly men­tioned in the same sen­tence as Philip Roth, John Updike, or Nor­man Mail­er, the elder states­men of con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture. There are some legit­i­mate rea­sons for that. Rep­u­ta­tion is often sim­ply a func­tion of out­put and, since 1993, Sty­ron had­n’t pub­lished any­thing new. He was then deal­ing with seri­ous depres­sion, which he wrote elo­quent­ly about in one of his last works, Dark­ness Vis­i­ble: A Mem­oir of Mad­ness, and he would be in and out of hos­pi­tals from there.