The Period of Slave Insurrections and Resistance 1640-1861

The publication of William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner in early 1968, and the subsequent negative response to it by ten black writers (Clarke, 1968), ¹ created a minor literary stir. There was sharp disagreement over Styron’s characterization both of Turner and of the rebellion, the blacks believing that Styron had caricatured Turner and misleadingly pictured the rebellion itself as a total debacle.