Set This House on Fire

The narrator, Peter Leverett, a government employee returning to the U.S., stops in the Italian village of Sambuco to see his old schoolmate Mason Flagg. But the next morning Flagg is found dead at the base of a cliff, a peasant girl has been beaten to death and Cass Kinsolving, a drunken American painter, is gone.

Though the case has been written off as a murder followed by a suicide, Peter doesn't believe it. His search takes him through the Mediterranean and back to America.

"This is not a book for the squeamish. For seldom in modern fiction have we had such a relentlessly powerful examination of human depravity." (Chicago Daily News)

Part Two Of Two Parts

The narrator, Peter Leverett, a government employee returning to the U.S., stops in the Italian village of Sambuco to see his old schoolmate Mason Flagg. But the next morning Flagg is found dead at the base of a cliff, a peasant girl has been beaten to death and Cass Kinsolving, a drunken American painter, is gone.

Though the case has been written off as a murder followed by a suicide, Peter doesn't believe it. His search takes him through the Mediterranean and back to America.

"This is not a book for the squeamish. For seldom in modern fiction have we had such a relentlessly powerful examination of human depravity." (Chicago Daily News)

Whether fictionalizing a slave uprising in The Confessions of Nat Turner or breaking the silence on clinical depression, William Styron's work inspired not only accolades but national dialogues.