Culture January 14, 2013

“For a person whose sole burning ambition is to write — like myself — college is useless beyond the sophomore year,” William Styron wrote to his father in 1946, after returning from Platoon Commander School in Quantico, Va., to resume his studies at Duke. Styron would go on to graduate — he was a nice boy, and eager to please his doting father — but he wasn’t kidding about his monomaniacal focus on writing, and in many ways the early pages of this splendid book are the hardest.