One of our goals here at Open Road is to provide readers with rare and never-before-seen content about our authors and their work.

To further that mission, we’re launching a new feature: each week we’ll showcase a different image from an author's archive or personal collection. This week we're focusing on William Styron, author of Sophie's Choice and Darkness Visible.

This photo shows Styron in 1926 at ten months old. He was an only child, born in a seaside hospital in Newport News, Virginia. As an adult, Styron would describe his childhood as happy, secure, and relatively uneventful. To read about Styron's relationship with his own children, check out his daughter Alexandra's forthcoming memoir Reading My Father.

Photograph courtesy of the Duke University Archives.

Our archival photos are part of the material we gather for the illustrated biographies that appear in the back of our ebooks. Each illustrated biography includes a written overview of an author’s career, along with family photos, manuscript pages, and letters.