Stoner

John Williams (1922-1994) was born and raised in northeast Texas. Despite a talent for writing and acting, Williams flunked out of a local junior college after his first year. He reluctantly joined the war effort, enlisting in the Army Air Corps, and managing to write a draft of his first novel while there. Once home, Williams found a small publisher for the novel and enrolled at the University of Denver, where he was eventually to receive both his B.A. and M.A., and where he was to return as an instructor in 1954. Williams remained on the staff of the creative writing program at the University of Denver until his retirement in 1985. During these years, he was an active guest lecturer and writer, publishing two volumes of poetry and three novels, Butcher's Crossing, Stoner, and the National Book Award–winning Augustus. »

John McGahern (1934-2006) was one of the most acclaimed Irish writers of his generation. His work, including six novels and four collections of short stories, often centered on the Irish predicament, both political and temperamental. Amongst Women, his best-known book, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and made into a popular miniseries. His last book, the memoir All Will Be Well, was published shortly before his death. »

By John Williams
Introduction by John McGahern

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.

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Reviews

A perfect novel, so well told and beautifully written, so deeply moving, it takes your breath away.
— Morris Dickstein, The New York Times Book Review, June 17, 2007

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

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

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

Also see:

Butcher's Crossing
By John Williams
Introduction by Michelle Latiolais

The author of Stoner dismantles the myth of the making of the American west in this tale of a Harvard dropout who seeks adventure hunting one of the last great buffalo herds, but ends up losing his innocence.

John Williams Collection

The words of Williams are elegant and effortlessly written in this collection of "the perfect novel" and a superb western.

Format: Paperback
Retail Price: $14.95
Price: $11.96 (20% off)

Jun 20, 2006
304 pages
ISBN: 1590171993
9781590171998
Literature in English
NYRB Classics

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Stoner

By John Williams Introduction by John McGahern

Reviews

Also see:

By John Williams
Introduction by John McGahern