Description

William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.

John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.

About the Author

John Williams (1922-1994) was born in Texas. The poet and novelist taught at and received his PhD from the University of Missouri in the early 1950s. In 1955 he took of the directorship of the University of Denver’s Creative Writing Program, where he became the editor of the University of Denver Quarterly. He remained at Denver until his retirement in 1986. Williams was a co-winner of the 1973 National Book Award for Fiction for the novel Augustus. His novel Butcher's Crossing will be published by NYRB Classics in January 2007.

Praise for Stoner…

"[T]he work deserves to be called a 'perfect novel' — there's not a misplaced word or a trace of contrivance." --Boldtype

"The best book I read in 2007 was Stoner by John Williams. It’s perhaps the best book I’ve read in years." --Stephen Elliott, The Believer

"John Williams's Stoner is something rarer than a great novel - it is a perfect novel, so well told and beautifully written, so deeply moving, that it takes your breath away." --The New York Times Book Review

"Williams didn't write much compared with some novelists, but everything he did was exceedingly fine...it's a shame that he's not more often read today...But it's great that at least two of his novels [Stoner, Butcher's Crossing] have found their way back into print." --The Denver Post

“A masterly portrait of a truly virtuous and dedicated man”—The New Yorker

“Why isn’t this book famous…Very few novels in English, or literary productions of any kind, have come anywhere near its level for human wisdom or as a work of art.”—C.P. Snow

“Serious, beautiful and affecting, what makes Stoner so impressive is the contained intensity the author and character share.”—Irving Howe, New Republic

“A quiet but resonant achievement”—The Times Literary Supplement

"Perhaps the greatest example of minimalism I’ve ever read...Stoner is a story of great hope for the writer who cares about her work." --Stephen Elliott

“Stoner by John Williams, contains what is no doubt my favorite literary romance of all time. William Stoner is well into his 40s, and mired in an unhappy marriage, when he meets Katherine, another shy professor of literature. The affair that ensues is described with a beauty so fierce that it takes my breath away each time I read it. The chapters devoted to this romance are both terribly sexy and profoundly wise.”—The Christian Science Monitor