My Generation: Collected Nonfiction

This collection includes all of the individual pieces of writing from Styron’s previous two volumes of nonfiction—This Quiet Dust and Havanas in Camelot—together with more than thirty previously uncollected or unpublished pieces of writing.  The selections are essays, book reviews, memoirs, op-eds, articles, eulogies, speeches, and other miscellanea. The book provides a fifty-year record of Styron’s efforts in nonfiction, from 1951 to 2001.

Styron was known primarily as a novelist, but he carried on an active sideline in nonfiction, lending his voice to various causes and fulfilling the role of the writer engagé. My Generation, published in 2015 by Random House, is a chronicle of the times through which Styron lived and a record of his views on his native South, race and slavery, military life, the Holocaust, mental disorder, and the literary life.

The volume includes a foreword by Tom Brokaw and an editorial note by James L. W. West III.