New York ? 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 been given a prize he hopes will justify the novel to all readers. Tuesday night, the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation gave the author its third annual Witness to Justice Award.

“This award sort of clears the air for me,” he said in a recent interview from his home in Roxbury, Conn. “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.

“Sophie’s Choice” won the National Book Award and later was adapted into a movie, with Meryl Streep winning an Academy Award for her performance as the title character. But the novel was also attacked as unfit material for a gentile, just as years earlier blacks had criticized Styron for his fictionalized slave narrative, “The Confessions of Nat Turner.”

In the essay “The Rights of History and The Rights of Imagination,” author Cynthia Ozick faulted Styron for using a Catholic as the main character and alleges that he mistook Nazi brutality in Poland for the Holocaust itself.

Styron, who called the essay “utterly unfair and inaccurate,” said Ozick had ignored “page after page” of details about the treatment of Jews. “I stand by my nuanced criticism,” Ozick recently told the AP.

The Auschwitz foundation was established in 1995 “to support the creation of a Jewish cultural and educational center in Oswiecim (the Polish name for Auschwitz), Poland.” Organization founder Fred Schwartz, a businessman once known for his “Fred the Furrier” television commercials, is a close friend of Styron’s.

“Styron was uniquely able to portray the human condition in a specific way. He humanized the loss, the terrible destruction,” said Schwartz, who added that it was his idea to give Styron the award.

Previous winners of the prize include former U.S. envoy Stuart Eizenstat, for his help obtaining compensation for Holocaust survivors, and HBO for the film “Conspiracy,” about the Nazis’ decision to exterminate the Jews.