The Confessions of Nat Turner [antikvár]

Author's Note In August, 1831, in a remote région of southeastern Virginia, there took place the only effective, sustained revolt in the annals of American Negro slavery. The initial passage of this book, entitled 'To the Public', is the preface to the single significant contemporary document concerning this insurrection - a brief pamphlet of some twenty pages called 'The Confessions of Nat Turner', published in Richmond early in the next year, parts of which have been incorporated in this book. During the narrative that follows I have rarely departed from the known facts about Nat Turner and the revoit of which he was the leader. However, in those areas where there is little knowledge in regard to Nat, his early life, and the motivations for the revolt (and such knowledge is lacking most of the time), I have allowed myself the utmost freedom of imagination in reconstructing events - yet I trust remaining within the bounds of what meager enlightenment history has left us about the institution of slavery. The relativity of time allows us elastic définitions: the year 1831 was, simultaneously, a long time ago and only yesterday. Perhaps the reader will wish to draw a moral from this narrative, but it has been my own intention to try to re-create a man and his era, and to produce a work that is less an 'historical novel' in conventional terms than a méditation on history. WILLIAM STYRON Roxbury, Connecticut New Year's Day, 1967