History is just another greasy pole. No one stays at the top long.

It was William Styron—the product of what he wryly termed an “absolutely impeccable WASP background”—who dug up the buried nugget of Nat Turner’s rebellion and polished it into a modern parable. This was the reason for its initial praise—from black readers as well as white. But it also became the reason for the startling reversal of fortune that followed. The Confessions of Nat Turner remains the most vivid case of a literary work that arrived in glory—critical praise; a Pulitzer Prize; the top slot on the New York Times best-seller list—only to be consumed by larger forces that its creator, for all his imaginative powers, didn’t see coming. In August 1967, the Times would describe Styron, without irony, as an “expert in the Negro condition.” Six months later many were regarding him as a frothing racist, accused—as Styron bitterly recalled—of having written “a malicious work, deliberately falsifying history.” He had, as he later put it, “unwittingly created one of the first politically incorrect texts of our time.”

Today the furor over The Confessions of Nat Turner is more relevant than ever. The questions Styron struggled with continue to provoke us. Who “owns” American history? Who gets to tell which stories—and why? Is artistic license a hallowed precept or a stale presumption? Bill Styron learned the answers in the most direct and painful way...