There used to be a time when writers, purely on the basis of the books they had published, were invited to eat dinner with presidents. By his own estimation, the novelist William Styron , who died in 2006, was one of the last of his kind to enjoy an honor more likely, "since John F. Kennedy at least," to be bestowed upon "rock stars, stand-up comedians and golf champions." "Havanas in Camelot," his charming collection of essays, recounts two such dinners, one with Kennedy, whose fondness for cigars both impressed and intimidated the cigarette-addicted Styron, and the other with François Mitterand, after which Styron, Arthur Miller , Carlos Fuentes, Elie Wiesel and the Greek politician Andreas Papandreou had to be rescued from an exuberant crowd of Mitterand's admirers by a resplendent Melina Mercouri: "A heady and thrilling moment indeed, even when - as Fuentes pointed out - the crowd surely thought that the five gentlemen in their raincoats were Mercouri's bodyguards."

Styron's brief, affectionate portraits of both presidents establish the tone that predominates in these essays: at once laconic and taut, urbane and modest. Despite their monumentality, all three of the novels for which he is famous - "Lie Down in Darkness," "The Confessions of Nat Turner" and "Sophie's Choice" - derive their power from Styron's capacity to combine intimate experience with an authoritative grasp of 20th-century history. Styron was bold enough, despite being a white, Protestant Southerner, to write from the point of view of a black slave and to enter the imagination of a Polish woman who survived Auschwitz. He was also bold enough to publish, long before it became fashionable to do so, a harrowing and redemptive account of his experience of depression, "Darkness Visible," thereby ushering in an era's worth of such memoirs, few of which have equaled, much less surpassed, his own.

Not surprisingly, the difficulty of balancing two very different identities - that of Styron the public figure and Styron the intensely private, highly self-conscious writer - is evident throughout. It's no coincidence that he shows us Kennedy at a rare moment when the president didn't realize he was being watched, standing "at the bottom of a flight of stairs looking momentarily lost and abandoned"; nor that Mitterand most captivates Styron when, despite the French leader's reported indifference to food, he actually seems to enjoy his dinner: "One could tell from the gusto with which he put away the elegant white spears of asparagus that he cares at least as much about eating as he does about attractive young women." ....continued