Book club lists biography of william

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Penn State University Libraries’ new Eberly Family Special Collections Library exhibit “William Styron: Books and Biography” has been guest-curated by Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English James L.W. West III, an expert on Styron and his works and donor of the collection from which the exhibition was curated.

West gave a talk about his work as Styron’s bibliographer and biographer on Tuesday, Sept. 26, in Foster Auditorium, 102 Paterno Library, on the University Park campus, in conjunction with the opening of the exhibition. He traced the collection’s development and discussed the interrelationships and similarities between the disciplines of bibliography and biography.

“It is a rare and ambitious feat to bring in a guest curator to curate an exhibit with our collections,” said Athena Jackson, Dorothy Feohr Huck Chair and head of the Eberly Family Special Collections Library. “We are delighted to have Professor West’s expertise and unique lens as a scholar to learn more about Styron and his oeuvre.” 

Styron was one of the most prominent writers of his generation and the author of “Lie Down in Darkness,” “The Long March,” “Set This House on Fire,” “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” “Sophie’s Choice” and “Darkness Visible.” During his career Styron won the Pulitzer Prize, the Howells Medal, the National Book Award and the Legion of Honor. Three of his books topped the bestseller lists in the U.S., and he enjoyed a wide readership in Europe, Asia and South America.

West, a Penn State English professor since 1986, is a biographer, book historian and scholarly editor. He was Styron’s bibliographer and his biographer, an unusual combination. West’s books include “William Styron: A Life” and an edition of Styron’s collected nonfiction, titled “My Generation,” published by Random House in 2015. The Special Collections Library exhibition features items

Literature by William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams’s medical practice and his literary career formed an undivided life. For forty years he was a busy doctor in the town of Rutherford, New Jersey, and yet he was able to write more than thirty books. One of the finest chapters in this Autobiography tells how each of his two roles stimulated and supported the other. We meet in these pages many of Williams’s friends: he writes with discerning frankness of the poets H.D., Ezra Pound, and Marianne Moore; of the artists Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, Charles Sheeler, and the photographer Alfred Stieglitz; and there are fine portraits of the writers who congregated in Paris in the Twenties: Joyce, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Ford Madox Ford. The Autobiography is an unpretentious book; it reads much as Williams talked––spontaneously and often with a special kind of salty humor. But it is a very human story, glowing with warmth and sensitivity. It brings us close to a rare man and lets us share his affectionate concern for the people to whom he ministered, body and soul, through a long rich life as physician and writer.