Of all the many American Southern writers who emerged around and after the Second World War, William Styron eventually had the most popular success. Considering that this group included Walker Percy, Peter Taylor, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty, Styron’s was a remarkable achievement.

After serious critical consideration and much discussion of his first three books, there was ultimately a sharp division of opinion over The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), though it won a Pulitzer prize.

Sophie’s Choice (1979) hit the bestseller lists all over the world, and then in 1982 became a movie in the hands of Alan J. Paluka (who wrote and directed it), with Meryl Streep in the role of the Polish heroine haunted by her concentration-camp experiences. The somewhat negative critical reaction to this perhaps did less than justice to Styron’s original concept, but Streep’s powerful performance won her an Oscar.

Born in 1925 in Newport News, Virginia, the son of a shipyard engineer and grandson, on his father’s side, of a Confederate officer, William Styron went to school in Middlesex County, Virginia. He went on to Davidson College in North Carolina, but was called up. While he was a US Marines officer candidate he attended William Blackburn’s creative writing course at Duke University. This determined him in his career. He reached Okinawa as a Marine lieutenant just as the war was ending, and, after demobilisation, returned to Duke and graduated in 1947.

Styron, 23, and now determined to become a writer but not yet quite experienced enough, joined the publishers McGraw Hill in New York. Before the end of the year he had been sacked for “slovenly appearance, not wearing hat, reading New York Post”, as he later commented.

Undeterred, he joined Hiram Haydn’s writing course at the New School for Social Research. With Haydn’s personal encouragement and with his parents’ financial support, he set to work on his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness. Published in 1951, it won him the Prix de Rome, which entailed a residency at the American Academy in Rome in 1952. En route he sojourned in Paris where he served as advisory editor to the magazine Paris Review.

Lie Down in Darkness describes, in good, well-handled high style, the reasons for the suicide of a young Virginian girl, Peyton Loftis. It opens with her funeral, and the events which have led to it are traced back, with great skill in so young a writer, in a series of concentric flashbacks. These involve the recollections of her guilty father, a jealous and sadistic mother, and others in her life. Styron was possibly a little overambitious. Peyton’s suicide coincides with the dropping of the atom bomb at Hiroshima, a “global fall from innocence”. There were also echoes of the Electra myth, exploited to great effect by Eugene O’Neill. But critics appreciated the hugeness of the conception and acclaimed its promise: “the key psychological work of the period”, as one said.

An influence insufficiently noted at the same time became apparent much later, when Styron wrote Admiral Robert Penn Warren and the Snows of Winter: A Tribute (1978). Penn Warren, too, had struggled with grandiosity and with Jacobean influences, and had enjoyed success from a movie of one of his books, All the King’s Men.

In the year of his first success Styron was briefly recalled to service as a Marine, in the Korean War. From this experience he wrote The Long March, published first in the magazine discovery No 1 in 1953, and then as a book in 1956. Set in a Marine Corps training camp during the Korean War, it was a taut fable about a rebellious officer who sets himself against military mores in seeking to outdo his superiors in endurance.

In it Styron tried with considerable success to write something economical and exactly controlled. By some he was now accused of writing on too small a scale. For others this novella remains his most outstanding work.

Set This House on Fire (1960), set among American expatriates in Europe, is generally regarded as the book in which his gifts can be seen at their fullest strength. The central figures here are Cass Kinsolving, a young Southern-born artist who can no longer paint; Mason Flagg, an embodiment of evil; and Kinsolving’s fellow-Southerner, John Leverett.

The alcohol-fuelled Kinsolving journeys through the lower depths (mostly in Italy) before he finds himself and returns home. Leverett’s own failure to come to terms with his roots is intimately connected with Kinsolving’s plight. Not as well made as his first novel, and often wildly overwritten, Set This House on Fire nevertheless also contains some of the most powerful passages Styron ever wrote. The adjective “Dostoevskian” applied by some critics was not altogether unjustified. In any event, the attacks made on the book, as well as the praise bestowed upon it, established it as a major novel. Styron was now one of the most important young American writers.

He based his next novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), on a Southern theme, this time an historical one, the slave insurrection of 1831 in southern Virginia, led by Nat Turner (of whose actual life little is known, although he left a 24-page “confession” before being executed).

The book, told as if by him, does not try to reproduce the language of an early 19th-century plantation slave. Instead, it puts at Turner’s disposal all the resources of the highly educated Victorian novel.

The attempt to arm Turner with all the educational, ethical and other dimensions which he had been denied in his life was a daring experiment, and a well-intentioned one. But it does not quite come off. Turner himself is wooden, and never comes alive. A number of leading critics (mainly white and including such distinguished names as George Steiner, Alfred Kazin and Philip Rahv) praised it as an impressive contribution to the literature of slavery. Its timing, at the height of the civil rights movement in the US, was impeccable. It became a bestseller and won the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

But then Styron began to be attacked by black readers, and the book eventually provoked the angry counterblast, William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond (1968). Readers, black and white, now pounced on Styron for the unreality of his portrait of a black man with a white sensibility, haunted by his passion for a white girl. Critics complained that slaves were portrayed as “incompetent Sambos”, and that Styron greatly exaggerated the benevolent aspects of slavery. Once the dust had settled the more reasoned verdict was that the novel was over- researched and somewhat lifeless. Turner is an idea for a man, but never quite lives as flesh-and-blood on the page.

Styron held himself aloof from the debate and began work on his next novel, Sophie’s Choice. This was immensely successful, rising to the top of the New York Times bestseller list and winning the 1980 American Book Award for fiction. Besides being made into a film it became an opera of the same title from the British composer Nicholas Maw in 2002.

It also attracted controversy. Its protagonist was a Polish Catholic who, critics objected, could hardly be taken as a representative victim of the Holocaust. A more vivid character was Sophie’s lover, the mad New York Jew who is such a brilliant talker. Sophie herself is sentimentally conceived, and her young Virginian friend — an attempt at a self-portrait — comes across unclearly. Yet the book, if suggesting waning creative power, was deeply honest. Styron’s indignation about the perpetration of evil was always accessible to the general reader.

Styron’s single play, In the Clap Shack, was produced at New Haven, Connecticut, in 1972 and published the following year. It is a comedy set in the genitourinary ward of a US Navy hospital during the Second World War.

In his later years Styron suffered from acute depression from which, however, he reccovered. An account of the experience, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, was published in 1990. He collected three short stories in a volume, A Tidewater Morning: Three Tales from Youth, in 1993.

Styron is survived by his wife, Rose Burgunder, and by a son and three daughters.

William Styron, novelist, was born on June 11, 1925. He died on November 1, 2006, aged 81.