Prijepor o Natu Turneru

In the late sixties, William Styron, who had acquired considerable reputation with his first three novels, published "The Confessions of Nat Turner", a fictionalized account of a slave rebellion in Virginia in 1831. The author himself, as well as influential white critics, thought that the book was highly sympathetic to Nat Turner, the black rebel leader, and expected a positive response from the black community. However, a number of black Writers attacked Styron for what they saw as profoundly racíst attitudes. This paper examines the problematic aspects of the novel and the main issues of this controversy as generally illustrative of the difficulties involved in bridging cultural and historical misunderstandings and, in its particularities, as characteristic of America in the 196os