William Styron
(1925 - 2006)
Having served in the marines in the Pacific at the end of World War II, William Styron graduated from Duke University in 1947 and took a copyediting and blurb-writing job in New York City, from which he was reportedly fired for flying paper airplanes. He published his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness, in 1951 and wrote the introductory essay for the first issue of The Paris Review two years later. He received a Pulitzer Prize for The Confessions of Nat Turner in 1968.