It was in a similar spirit that Styron, active in liberal causes and Democratic politics throughout the 1960s, supposed he might reconstitute the mind-set of a black man from the 1830s. And in the summer of 1960, back from a trip to Paris and Rome—and coming off the disappointment of an ambitious but poorly received book about expatriate life, Set This House on Fire—he began gathering material on “wild Nat Turner, that fanatical black demon whose ghost had seared my imagination throughout my boyhood and youth,” as he would have his narrator, Stingo, recall in the 1979 novel Sophie’s Choice.

Parker, as preacher Nat Turner, center, with Armie Hammer and Jayson Warner Smith in The Birth of a Nation. From Fox Searchlight Pictures/Everett Collection.

Styron, that September, had just begun to immerse himself in his background reading when his wife, Rose, picked up the phone. It was Robert Silvers, a 30-year-old magazine editor and part of the Paris Review crowd, along with George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen, and Styron himself. Today, Silvers is best known as the editor of The New York Review of Books, which he helped found in 1963. But in 1960 he was at Harper’s and was editing James Baldwin, who was trying to finish an essay on Dr. King. “I worked with him closely on it at a flat he then had in the West Village,” Silvers remembers. “He told me that he’d become exhausted and tired of New York and wanted to get away, and it occurred to me that Bill, with whom I’d talked about Jimmy’s work, might want to have him stay [at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut].”

Styron offered Baldwin his guesthouse, a small barn, which was near the main house with an arbor in between. It was normally Styron’s workspace, but he shifted to a spare upstairs bedroom in the roomy farmhouse. For the next eight months, off and on, Baldwin stayed with the Styrons and their three small children, working on his novel Another Country. The two writers kept separate schedules and got together at dinner with Rose around nine o’clock, the start of a long evening in the peaceful rural night—amid six acres of gently rolling farmland.

The three would retreat to the living room in the back of the house, with its high ceiling, stucco walls, and glass doors. Styron poured Jack Daniel’s at the pine bar, and on frigid winter nights a fire roared in the large hearth as the two men chain-smoked and conversed late into the evening. Both were talkers, though of different sorts: Styron was a raconteur, deliberate, measured, almost diffident, as he carefully shaped his phrases, pausing between thoughts; Baldwin, bristling with nervous energy, had blazing dark eyes and a silken voice roughened by the booze and the Marlboros. “I think that Jimmy broke down the last shred,” Styron was to say, “of whatever final hangup of Southern prejudice I might have had . . . .”

It was more friendship than literary partnership. “We never spoke about our work, or very rarely,” Baldwin later told The Paris Review. “It was a wonderful time in my life, but not at all literary. We sang songs, drank a little too much, and on occasion chatted with the people who were dropping in to see us.” It was a curious pairing, Harlem and Tidewater. Baldwin’s grandparents had been slaves; Styron’s grandmother had owned slaves. This history brought them closer together by the calculus of high liberal optimism in the early 60s when civil rights had become not just an issue or a cause but a call to ennoblement. “They talked about their black and white southern history,” Rose Styron, 88, now recalls, “and how similar and different they were, but also how they understood the same culture.” The story of Nat Turner was about slavery and race, but just as profoundly about the South.

Baldwin was months away from going to Chicago for a rare interview with Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam, and then writing about it in his great book of essays The Fire Next Time, with its warning that white America had much to answer for. Before leaving Roxbury, however, Baldwin insisted, in fact dared, Styron to write Nat Turner’s story from inside the character’s own head. It was a prodigious leap. But it was a purely aesthetic one, not fraught with the charges of “cultural appropriation” that so often weigh on writers today. Midcentury artists were intellectual free agents, who could steal whatever they found. Examples were rife and extreme. The hothouse flower Tennessee Williams had created the feral, brutish Stanley Kowalski. Norman Mailer, the Brooklyn Jew from Harvard, filled his novels with Texas rednecks and Boston Irishmen. Baldwin himself peopled his books with narrators who crossed racial and sexual boundaries. And yet for Styron the risks were higher. The long history of whites “playing” blacks was tainted with minstrelsy. Great writers like Melville and Faulkner had tried, but from a distance. To invent Turner’s “voice” would be a brazen act with little precedent. With Baldwin’s encouragement, or blessing, Styron began his impersonation of Nat Turner.

In the Kennedys’ Court

In April 1962, the Kennedys invited Nobel laureates and other V.I.P.’s to the White House for one of the first of the great Camelot galas. Baldwin and Styron, two promising writers in their mid-30s, were in attendance. “Huck and Jim,” Styron said at the time, comparing the two of them to their dignified elders. “Jack and Jackie actually shimmered,” Styron would later write in Vanity Fair. “They were truly the golden couple,” their glamour palpable to some of the guests, who seemed lost in “a goofy, catatonic glaze.”