William Styron, the American novelist who wrote Sophie's Choice, has died of pneumonia after a long illness. He was 81.

Styron, who endured a lifelong battle with depression that took him through alcoholism to the brink of suicide in the 1980s, wrote two of America's most controversial and highly regarded novels of the second half of the twentieth century: The Confessions of Nat Turner, the story of a black slave revolt published at the height of the civil rights movement, and Sophie's Choice, the story of a haunted Holocaust survivor.

Fellow authors praised him today. "This is terrible," said Kurt Vonnegut, the beat generation novelist and an old friend of Styron's. "He was dramatic, he was fun. He was strong and proud and he was awfully good with the language. I hated to see him end this way."

Norman Mailer, the writer and essayist, told The New York Times: "No other American writer of my generation has had so omnipresent and exquisite a sense of the elegiac. That is no mean virtue in these years."

"He was always generous to me as a younger writer," said E.L. Doctorow, the author of Ragtime. "He stood in my mind as a sort of writerly presence, an iconic Southern writer."

Styron, the son of a shipyard engineer from Newport News, Virginia, was best known for his 1979 work, Sophie's Choice, the story of a young Southerner who meets a Polish-Catholic survivor of the Nazi death camps in Brooklyn, New York.

The book was made into an Oscar-winning film starring Meryl Streep but attracted criticism for Styron, who was told he could not empathise with those who survived the Holocaust. In 2002, the writer was recognised by the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation with its "Witness to Justice Award" of which Styron said: "It is a kind of solid validation for me of what I tried to do as a novelist."

Sophie's Choice was published 12 years after the book that made Styron's name and established him as a major American writer, unafraid to describe the experiences of communities to which he did not obviously belong.

The Confessions of Nat Turner, published in 1967, portrayed the leader of a slave rebellion in 1831 as heroic, mad and uncertain and earned Styron critical success, in the form of the Pulitzer Prize, and opprobrium from every side. Critics described him as "psychologically sick" and "morally senile". A book-length rejection of the novel, William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond, was printed in 1968.

Depression ran in Styron's family and after the death of his mother when he was 13, he was sent to boarding school. Looking back on his youth in an interview in 1990, Styron said: "Some of my problems I think came from a continuing anguish over my mother’s death and if I had gotten shot it would have been, I suppose, some kind of completion. It’s hard to say how that would have worked out."

He served as a lieutenant in the US Marines in the last stages of the Second World War, and was assigned to the force that occupied Japan. "When I was a young Marine platoon leader, there was this incredible sense of fate. The myth at that age is you’re going to live forever. Well, I never believed that and my friends didn’t. I thought I was going to die," he recalled.

Returning to America, he worked as a junior book editor before writing his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness, which was published in 1951 when he was 26. The story of a young woman sliding towards suicide after the bombing of Hiroshima, Lie Down in Darkness was followed by two more novels about Americans living in Italy after the Second World War. During his time in Rome, Styron met Rose Burgunder, the poet who became his wife. They had four children.

In the 1980s, Styron gave up alcohol but was pushed to the edge of suicide by mood-altering drugs. He was hospitalised from 1985 to 1986 but emerged to write Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness in 1990, a best-selling account of his experience. He never finished another novel.

Times Recommends

• A doctor, a daughter and a man called Johnny
• Mona Lisa's smile may belie ill health
• ‘Parasite economy’ lies behind Greek tragedy