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This Quiet Dust
  • Published: 18 December 2012
  • ISBN: 9780099577034
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $27.99

This Quiet Dust



The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sophie's Choice explores a range of moral, political, historical and literary subjects in this impressive collection of essays, threaded with personal memoirs

In This Quiet Dust, the first book of non-fiction by the Pulitzer Prize-wining author of Lie Down in Darkness and Sophie's Choice, William Styron addresses great moral issues with passion and precision.

His writing is at once meditative and engaged, personal and erudite, whether he is covering the dark side of the American and European dream, exploring the greats of American literature, or exploring the nature of the American South. Throughout, Styron's warmth, humour and candour, coupled with a refusal to judge, make for stirring and stimulating reading.

  • Published: 18 December 2012
  • ISBN: 9780099577034
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $27.99

About the author

William Styron

Born in Newport News, Virginia, in 1925, William Styron was educated at Duke University. He served in the Marine Corps during the last war, and was recalled to service during the Korean War. After 1952, he lived mainly in Europe, before settling in a rural part of Connecticut.

He is the author of The Long March, Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire and Sophie's Choice. He has also published Darkness Visible, the remarkable story of his descent into depression, the collection This Quiet Dust and Other Writings, and A Tidewater Morning. William Styron died in 2006.

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Praise for This Quiet Dust

[Styron is] the most accomplished craftsman, and one of the most penetrating witnesses of our life

Associated Press

Styron has bought to bear his penetrating intelligence and immense skills in confronting explosive themes

Financial Times

One of those quintessentially American writers capable of blending the rugged with the romantic, the macho with the tender

Daily Telegraph

[A man] whose fiction turned brutal truths into beauty

Daily Telegraph