Another award for ‘Sophie’s Choice’

For more than 20 years, William Styron’s “Sophie’s Choice” has been praised as a novelist’s worthy dramatization of human cruelty and criticized as a gentile’s limited view of the Holocaust.

Now, the 77-year-old Styron has received a prize he hopes will justify the novel to all readers. On Tuesday night, the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation was to give the author its third annual Witness to Justice Award.

“This award sort of clears the air for me,” he said in an interview. “It is a kind of solid validation for me of what I tried to do as a novelist.”

Published in 1979, “Sophie’s Choice” is the story of a young Southern writer who befriends a Catholic survivor of the Nazi occupation of Poland. The book features extensive flashbacks to Sophie’s horrifying war experiences.

It won the National Book Award and later was adapted into a movie, with Meryl Streep winning an Academy Award.