Stoner

First published in 1965 and rediscovered decades later to become an unlikely international bestseller, Stoner is John Williams's quiet masterpiece about an ordinary life. William Stoner is born into a poor Missouri farming family and sent to the state university to study agriculture. Instead, a required literature course awakens an unexpected love of learning, and he abandons the farm to become a teacher of English — a vocation he holds for the rest of his life.

The novel follows Stoner across the decades that follow: a marriage that curdles almost immediately into cold estrangement, a bitter, career-long feud with a departmental rival, a brief and transforming love affair, and his fierce, private devotion to his daughter and to literature itself. Very little happens by the measure of ordinary drama, and yet Williams renders each disappointment and small grace with such clarity that the accumulation becomes profoundly moving.

Written in restrained, luminous prose, Stoner is a meditation on work, integrity, and the meaning a person can wrest from a life that the world would call a failure. It has been called the perfect novel and stands as one of the great rediscovered books of American literature.