Stoner, a novelbyJohn Edward Williams

Stoner (1965) is the third novel by 1973 National Book Award for Fiction winner John Edward Williams. It was published by Viking Press and recently re-issued by The New York Review of Books. The novel is about Willam Stoner, a son of a poor farmer who falls in love with literature and goes into academia. The novel follows his life, both academia and personal, during which his life rife with failures. His marriage and family life is in tatters and his academic career is nothing more than an afterthought in his department. His silverlining is that he becomes a popular professor because of his teaching skills. Yet, the novel ends on a devastating note, in a heartbreaking solitude. Despite all of this, Stoner somehow remains a triumphant figure. Dan Wakefield wrote "William Stoner's might be yet another of Thoreau's 'lives of quiet desperation' except that his strength of character, his relentless perception of himself and adherence to his own ideals, make his experience not only bearable but noble". The novel is a fantastic piece of achievement by Williams, and while grim, the sense of triumph within absolute solitude makes it all more remarkable.

---

Product 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.