WILLIAM STYRON (1925–2006), a native of the Virginia Tidewater, was a graduate of Duke University and a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. His books include Lie Down in Darkness, The Long March, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, Sophie’s Choice, This Quiet Dust, Darkness Visible, A Tidewater Morning, and Havanas in Camelot. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Howells Medal, the American Book Award, and the Légion d'Honneur. With his wife, the poet and activist Rose Styron, he lived for most of his life in Roxbury, Connecticut, and Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts, where he is buried.

JAMES L. W. WEST III is an Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of William Styron: A Life (1998) and the editor of Styron's Letters to My Father (2009). West is the general editor of the ongoing Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald.