After the great success in 1990 of Darkness Visible , his memoir of depression and recovery, William Styron wrote more frequently in an introspective, autobiographical mode. Havanas in Camelot brings together fourteen of his personal essays, including a reminiscence of his brief friendship with John F. Kennedy; a recollection of the power and ceremony on display at the inauguration of François Mitterrand; memoirs of Truman Capote, James Baldwin, and Terry Southern; a meditation on Mark Twain; an account of Styron’s daily walks with his dog; and an evocation of his summer home on Martha’s Vineyard. Styron’s essays touch on the great themes of his fiction–racial oppression, slavery, and the Holocaust–but for the most part they address other subjects: bowdlerizations of history, literary lists, childhood moviegoing, the censoring of his own work, and the pursuit of celebrity fetish objects. These essays, which reveal a reflective and humorous side of Styron’s nature, make possible a fuller assessment of this enigmatic man of American letters. In his last year Styron (1925–2006) was working on a retrospective collection of personal essays from the 1980s and 1990s, a project subsequently completed by his widow, Rose. The result is an exhilarating parade of pithy, wry, and revealing true tales that remind us with a jolt of just how spirited, incisive, and spit-shined a writer Styron was. A southerner and the grandson of a slave owner, he joined the marines at 17, published his first novel at 26, chafed at being hailed as an heir to Faulkner, and stirred up considerable controversy with The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) and Sophie’s Choice (1979). In his essays, Styron is strategically charming. The collection’s curious title is plucked from an arresting remembrance of President John F. Kennedy and his passion for Cuban cigars. Styron also pays piquant tribute to Mark Twain, Truman Capote, and James Baldwin; praises walking as a catalyst for creativity; and tells harrowing, hilarious, and socially incisive tales about a youthful medical scare and a trip to Chicago to visit Nelson Algren, whose idea of fun was a tour of Cook County Jail’s Death Row. Beneath the wonderfully diverting dazzle of his wit and virtuosity, Styron addresses crucial matters of freedom, art, and empathy. --Donna Seaman “Styron exhales in these essays, displaying an ease that conveys even more intensely the fire within.”— Boston Globe “Each of Styron’s fourteen pieces is a gem.”— Newsweek “The graceful results of one man’s struggle to describe in the most perfect possible words the geography of the human heart.”— Cleveland Plain Dealer “A poignant reminder of the power and appeal of a voice now silent.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review “The empathetic and keenly observed recollections of a grand old man of letters looking back with fondness on a life rich with incident . . . a gently rolling memory loop from a man who was generous in his praise and exacting in his art.”— Los Angeles Times Book Review From the Trade Paperback edition. William Styron (1925-2006) , a native of the Virginia Tidewater, was a graduate of Duke University and a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. His books include Lie Down in Darkness, The Long March, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, Sophie’s Choice, This Quiet Dust, Darkness Visible , and A Tidewater Morning . He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Howells Medal, the American Book Award, the Légion d’Honneur, and the Witness to Justice Award from the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation. With his wife, the poet and activist Rose Styron, he lived for most of his adult life in Roxbury, Connecticut, and in Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts, where he is buried.