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.
Quotes
It’s simply a novel about a guy who goes to college and becomes a teacher. But it’s one of the most fascinating things that you’ve ever come across.
— Tom Hanks, Time Magazine
Stoner is written in the most plainspoken of styles….Its hero is an obscure academic who endures a series of personal and professional agonies. Yet the novel is utterly riveting, and for one simple reason: because the author, John Williams, treats his characters with such tender and ruthless honesty that we cannot help but love them.
— Steve Almond, Tin House
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.
— Morris Dickstein, 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
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
This reprint of Williams’s remarkable 1965 novel offers a window on early 20th century higher education in addition to its rich characterizations and seamless prose.
—
Publisher’s Weekly
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- Format: Paperback
- Publication Date: June 20, 2006
- Pages: 304
- ISBN: 9781590171998
- Series: NYRB Classics
- Categories: Available as E-Book
