Turner's Rebellion took place in the long hot summer of 1831, in the state of Virginia. When it was over, 59 white people were dead; the insurgents were rounded up and either hanged or worse; and Nat Turner, a preacher, confessed to his part in the only effective revolt in the annals of American Negro slavery.

In his introduction of this Pulitzer Prize winner, Styron says "it has been my own intention to try to re-create a man and his era, and to produce a work that is less an historical novel in conventional terms than a meditation on history."