The dwindling band of brother novelists who defined the postwar generation of American letters lost another member this week when William Styron died Wednesday at 81.

	William Styron -- Spent childhood summers in Uniontown. Click photo for larger image.

Left are such survivors as Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and Kurt Vonnegut, all in their 80s and all contemplating their mortality. Vidal, for instance, concludes his latest memoir, "Point to Point Navigation," with a line from "Dunciad" by Alexander Pope, "And universal Darkness buries all."

Illness and recurring depression kept Styron isolated since the mid-1990s from the writing community where he was prominent for many years after publication of his first novel, "Lie Down in Darkness," in 1951.

The tale of a young girl's suicide in a Virginia town much like Styron's native Newport News caused critics rushing to judgment to label him the "heir" to William Faulkner's Southern tradition.

He was not. In fact, his mother was a Uniontown native, and his grandfather worked as a mine superintendent for Henry Clay Frick.

"I spent every summer in Fayette County until I was 15," Styron said in a visit here in 1993. "My first big city was Pittsburgh. I remember emerging from the Liberty Tubes into a wonderful, smoky metropolis."

The South was only part of Styron's territory, as subsequent novels proved. Also, unlike the hermitic Faulkner, Styron played an active role in a variety of endeavors, from being a co-founder of the Paris Review in 1953 to testifying against the Chicago police after the brutal arrests of demonstrators during the 1968 Democratic convention.

Styron's 1967 novel, "The Confessions of Nat Turner," confronted the Old South's worst fear -- slave rebellion -- and earned him both prizes and condemnation from black American writers for appropriating their history.

The novelist refused to budge, then encountered more attacks after the publication of his most successful novel, "Sophie's Choice," in 1980, his story of a Holocaust survivor who was not a Jew.

Despite a round of criticism, Styron defended his choice.

And, while his contemporaries Vidal and Mailer wrote memoirs claiming they were admirable fellows, Styron bravely confronted his demons of depression and thoughts of suicide in his searing account, "Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness," in 1990.

What also set Styron apart was his earnest, unpretentious writing style and unapologetic romanticism. He was not the cynical ironist of Vidal or the tough, world-weary man's man of Mailer, but was sympathetic to the despair of wounded souls trying to escape their fate.

His struggles with depression after the death of his mother when he was 13 played a strong yet unconscious part in his writing, Styron said here in his 1993 visit.

And, while there are many stories of his struggles in the New York publishing world of the 1940s, the best was about his failure as an acquisition editor.

While at McGraw-Hill, Styron rejected a manuscript by adventurer Thor Heyerdahl about his little ocean cruise.

The book, "Kon-Tiki," was a best seller, and the documentary of its famed voyage won an Academy Award in 1951.

McGraw-Hill did American fiction an enormous favor by firing Styron, guaranteeing that he had time to write novels.