Sophie's Choice On November 1, 2006, William Styron died suddenly of pneumonia. While we mourn his loss and the fact that he will not see this book, we hope that our casebook on Sophie’s Choice will provide readers with a useful tool to help appreciate and reevaluate his novel. Over a quarter-century has passed since the 1979 first edition of Sophie’s Choice appeared. Since its publication, the novel has been re-imagined as an Academy Award-winning movie in 1982 and later as an opera, premiering in London in 2002. Few twentieth-century American works of fiction have inspired both cinematic and operatic versions (two that come to mind are Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby). Despite the fact that Sophie’s Choice won the American Book Award for fiction and served as an inspiration for a powerful film and opera, the novel continues to provoke heated debate over its methods, characters, and themes— indeed over its very existence. William Styron was no stranger to controversy. His entire career was marked by his uncanny ability to hit sensitive nerves. This tendency began in 1951 with the publication of Lie Down in Darkness, a dispassionate look at a dysfunctional New South, decaying under the weight of alcoholism, cruelty, selfishness, and false piety—a novel published when Styron was just twenty-six. As a native Virginian himself, Styron did not make many Southern friends with his first novel. Controversy continued in 1953 with the publication of The Long March, an anti-war novella, unfashionable in the 1950s. In 1960 Styron published his second full-length novel, Set This House on Fire, which takes place in a small Italian village populated by self-indulgent, corrupt Americans who bring vulgarity and violence to the Italian villagers.