Longtime Roxbury Resident Pens Memoir 

By Clementina Verge 

In her new memoir, Beyond This Harbor, former Roxbury resident, poet, and activist Rose Styron grants intimate glimpses into a legendary life—from her Baltimore childhood, to marrying Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist William Styron, to friendships with famous “writers, graphic artists, theater and film people.”

While visiting from New York in September 1954, “an old, empty white clapboard house in need of repair, with a crumbling white picket fence, full grape arbor, fragrant pink-rose covered trellis, and unkempt lawn caught our eyes,” she writes.

For 55 years, the 5-acre Rucum Road farmhouse became a sanctuary where they raised four children and William wrote his best known novels.

Styron reminisces about 1955’s “catastrophic flood that knocked out all bridges on the Housatonic River,” rushing furniture and home fragments on “currents down from Washington Depot,” and details an extensive social circle that included neighbors Arthur Miller, Marilyn Monroe, and Alexander Calder; their house, filled “with mirth and music,” welcomed Philip Roth, Mia Farrow, and James Baldwin among many others.

Though she loved “every corner” of the home that contained “some of [her] happiest memories,” when widowed in 2006, Styron retreated to Martha’s Vineyard, where, at 95, she enjoys time with her children and grandchildren. 

The Styrons’ presence will long linger in the area: In 1997, their donation to Roxbury Land Trust included the 22-acre Styron Preserve on Tophet Road.