Styron's confessional mode of writing novels in the first person can be traced to such diverse American writers as Herman Melville in Moby Dick, (1851), J. D. Salinger in Catcher in the Rye (1951), and Saul Bellow in The Adventures of Augie March (1953). Many contemporary novels rely upon the first-person narrator, linking the story directly to historical, semiautobiographical, and cultural events. The blend of fact and fiction became popular in the 1960s when Styron was at work on The Confessions of Nat Turner.