Sophie's Choice (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: William Styron
- First Published: 1979
- Type of Work: Novel
- Genres: Long fiction, Psychological fiction, Epic
- Subjects: New York, North America or North Americans, Northeast, U.S., United States or Americans, Mothers, Parents and children, Suicide, Authors or writers, New York City, 1940’s, World War II, Guilt, Mental illness, Nazism or Nazis, Holocaust, Jewish, Concentration camps
- Locales: Virginia, Brooklyn, NY, Washington, D.C., Warsaw, Poland, Cracow, Poland, Auschwitz-Birkenau
Sophie's Choice is Styron's most ambitious novel. It contains the major themes of his previous fiction, embodying his loves of the South and of literature, his experience of war, and his quest to write a major novel summing up the significant issues of his age. His narrator, Stingo, is a callow youth who is living in Brooklyn, as Styron did, trying to write fiction. Stingo's sexual experience has been limited, and he finds himself attracted to a beautiful Polish woman, Sophie, a survivor of a concentration camp.
It is 1947, and the incredible suffering of the Holocaust...
[The entire page is 638 words long]
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