The Confessions of Nat Turner
This Elibron Classics book is a facsimile reprint of a 1820 edition by John Murray, London.
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Frederick Turner has once again penned his sharp-witted observations on the unusual and often intriguing dichotomy of the real and the legendary in the American West.
*Now in its third edition, Of Chilies, Cacti, and Fighting Cocks remains a touchstone of popular Western literature
*Expanded edition includes two new essays
*Anyone interested in history, environmental issues, the American West, and particularly Native American history will give a resounding cheer for Turner’s contribution to the endlessly fascinating American West
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Customer Review: Five stars just for spelling “chiles” right
This is about the REAL Southwest, neither the Tex-Mexified version east of the Rockies, nor the touristy version of Santa Fe, nor the mythical version of the OK Corral. Most of this book deals with the largest U.S. desert — the Great Basin desert. A land of rugged climatic extremes and even more rugged geography, it has largely bent men to its will rather than the other way around. Beginning with his own childhood reading and first trips to this area, Turner paints a portrait of the Southwest’s natural and social history while also describing how he, too, has been shaped by this land.
Customer Review: Reprint is well-done!
A wonderful new edition of this lovely book has recently been done by Fulcrum Publishing. The ISBN is 1-55591-486-1. It includes new essays, including one on Gerogia O’Keefe that looks at the west from an artist’s perspective that I thought was particularly special.
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The Confessions of Nat Turner
Customer Review: Magnificent
In August 1831, in a remote region of south-eastern Virginia, took place the only effective and sustained revolt in the history of American Negro slavery. That year, a black man, Nat Turner, awaits death in a prison cell. He is a slave, a preacher and the leader of the revolt. Mr Styron based his novel on the single significant contemporary document concerning this insurrection, namely a brief pamphlet of twenty pages called “The Confessions of Nat Turner“, published in Richmond in 1831. The confession Turner made to his jailers under the duress of his God is a narrative describing a good man’s transformation into an avenging angel even as it encompasses all the betrayals, cruelties and humiliations that made up slavery - and that is still present in the collective psyches of both races.
This magnificent book brilliantly depicts the American past in a dazzling narrative.
Customer Review: A passionate and serious novel
This book did something that few books do - it made me cry. I think my tears were the result of an immersion in the scene and characters of the novel (both of which are deeply and intensely drawn) and a general sense of frustration about the world that it should have such painful things in its history.
The hero of the novel, and the narrator of the story, is the leader of a slave revolt in Virginia in 1831, Nat Turner. It is based on real historical events and Styron claimed to be trying to re-create ‘a man and his era’ . The novel accompanies Turner through each painful, ill-fated move leading up to his capture and a sad end.
I think this book is remarkable for its thick, richly drawn character development. It’s passionate, grand, awful, very serious, all these words seem to fit. It’s definitely not a light read, but I have gone on to read other William Styron books, and this still seems the strongest and my favourite.
Many people will take a familiar moral message about the iniquities of slavery away from the reading of this book, but Styron also called it a ‘meditation on history’. The true story of Nat Turner from his own point of view is not one we will ever hear. We do have a short pamphlet entitled ‘The Confessions of Nat Turner‘, claiming to be his words (a piece of propaganda probably created by the court which tried him) and we have Styron’s masterly novel. Two stories, and the truth probably in neither.
If you wanted to find out more about the ‘real life’ stories of slaves in the pre-Civil War US, I would also heartily recommend The Narrative of Frederick Douglas or Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl. I found these quite fascinating and powerful in a different way.
