IT can be a blessing and a burden to be the daughter of a literary luminary. Milton's daughters secured a kind of immortality by transcribing their blind father's lengthy masterpiece, ''Paradise Lost'' (of which the writer and critic Samuel Johnson wrote, ''None ever wished it longer than it is''). Mary Shelley, the daughter of the political...
READING MY FATHER A Memoir By Alexandra Styron 285 pp. Scribner. $25. Martin Amis, son of Kingsley, once remarked wittily that he had been name-dropping ''ever since I first said, 'Dad.' '' The Amis family, which counted Philip Larkin and Anthony Burgess among its regular guests, had nothing on the Styrons. ''My parents were invited on a day cruise...
READING MY FATHER A Memoir By Alexandra Styron Illustrated. 285 pages. Scribner. $25. When Alexandra Styron, the youngest of the novelist William Styron's four children, was growing up, she writes in her new memoir, there was one inviolate rule in the house: ''Don't ask Daddy about his work.'' This was no simple edict to live by. Styron (1925-2006)...