William Styron - Sophie's Choice

" [One morning] in the early spring, I woke up with the remembrance of a girl Id once known, Sophie. It was a very vivid half-dream, half-revelation, and all of a sudden I realized that hers was a story I had to tell. " That very day, William Styron began writing the first chapter of Sophies Choice. First published in 1979, this complex and ambitious novel opens with Stingo, a young southerner, journeying north in 1947 to become a writer. It leads us into his intellectual and emotional entanglement with his neighbors in a Brooklyn rooming house: Nathan, a tortured, brilliant Jew, and his lover, Sophie, a beautiful Polish woman whose wrist bears the grim tattoo of a concentration camp...and whose past is strewn with death that she alone survived. " Sophies Choice is a passionate, courageous book...a philosophical novel on the most important subject of the twentieth century, " said novelist and critic John Gardner in The New York Times Book Review. " One of the reasons Styron succeeds so well in Sophies Choic