Sophie's Choice
Styron, William
- Publisher: Random House, Inc.
- Date published: 1979
- Format: Hard Cover
- ISBN: 9780394461090
BOOK: Corners, Boards Bumped; Light Shelf Rub to Boards; Boards, Edges Lightly Soiled. DUST JACKET: Repaired; Lightly Creased; Lightly Chipped; Slight Fading Due to Sun Exposure; In Archival Quality Jacket Cover. A Novel. ALSO KNOWN AS: Portions of this book previously appeared in Esquire. MOVIE TIE-IN: This novel was the basis for the 1982 feature film of the same name. SYNOPSIS: Sophie's Choice unfolds a story as absorbing and effective and memorable as any work of fiction in our time. It is written at full tilt, and the mastery of its style and the power of its narrative never falter. Stingo came to Brooklyn by way of Virginia and the Marine Corps-with a brief sojourn as a manuscript reader at McGraw-Hill. He settled in Yetta Zimmerman's pink-painted rooming house, where the rent was cheap enough for a young man with only a few hundred dollars to devote himself to the novel he wanted to write. Sophie and Nathan lived upstairs, as he agonizingly discovered when their rocking bed threatened to collapse the ceiling. Thus began a strange relationship: Sophie, the Polish Catholic girl whose wrist bore the grim stamp of a concentration camp...Nathan, her lover, the charismatic Jewish intellectual...and the narrator Stingo, the sex-starved "South'n" boy who was instantly captivated by Sophie's vulnerable blond beauty. As Stingo struggles with his book-and tries desperately to cope with his growing but unrequited love for the woman upstairs-he also becomes Sophie's confidant, irresistibly absorbed in the harrowing story she tells of Nathan's obsessive jealousy and her own unshakable devotion to him. And as Nathan and Sophie's quarrels intensify, and Stingo is drawn even more into her life, she is compelled, bit by bit, to confront her past-a past strewn with death that she alone survived. In Sophie's Choice, William Styron gives us a love story so hauntingly evocative that it, and its heroine, will become an indelible part of the reader's imagination and our literature. William Styron was born in Newport News, Virginia. He served almost three years in the United States Marine Corps during World War II, and after the war, returned to complete his studies at Duke University. Lie Down in Darkness, William Styron's first novel, appeared in 1951. For that initial work, he was awarded the Prix de Rome of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Two years later his short novel The Long March was published, followed by Set This House on Fire (1960), The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), which received the Pulitzer Prize for 1967, and a play, In the Clap Shack (1973).
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