"I bought a bottle of old Grand-Dad bourbon; it was, I remember precisely, a full half pint, which was a prodigious amount of booze for a young man of twenty - at least, I know, for me. I got gloriously drunk on the Southern Railway local that rattled its way all night up through the Carolinas, gazing out at the bleak, moon-drenched wintry fields and happily pondered my deliverance. The chancellor, bless his soul, had really taken most of the curse off the bitter defeat I had initially felt there at the Biltmore. It really was better for me not to go to Oxford, I told myself, throwing in various Anglophilic injunctions: the food you wouldn't feed to a starving hound dog, the men were prancing homosexuals, the women all had foul breath, it was a moribund civilisation. "Screw Oxford," I remember saying aloud, and "Up yours, Cecil Rhodes!" Next year, instead of shivering to death in some library carrel, instead of - "Get this, old fellow!" I heard myself cackling - instead of writing a paper on the hexameters of Arthur Hugh Clough, that old Victorian nanny, I would be in New York, beginning my first novel."
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William Styron
William Clark Styron, Jr. (11 June 1925 – 1 November 2006) was an American novelist. He is most famous for two controversial novels: the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), depicting the life of Nat Turner, the leader of an 1831 Virginia slave revolt, and Sophie's Choice (1979), which deals with the Holocaust.
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