Stoner A Novel

Stoner : A Novel
ISBN: 9780099561545
Publication Date: 3 September 2012

'A masterly portrait of a truly virtuous and dedicated man' New Yorker

William Stoner enters the University of Missouri at nineteen to study agriculture. A seminar on English literature changes his life, and he never returns to work on his father's farm. Stoner becomes a teacher. He marries the wrong woman. His life is quiet, and after his death his colleagues remember him rarely.

Yet with truthfulness, compassion and intense power, this novel uncovers a story of universal value. Stoner tells of the conflicts, defeats and victories of the human race that pass unrecorded by history, and reclaims the significance of an individual life. A reading experience like no other, itself a paean to the power of literature, it is a novel to be savoured.

Review by John Purcell:

I completely missed the talk about Stoner by John Williams. Originally published in 1965 to critical praise and few sales it sank like a stone until 2003 when it was rediscovered and celebrated as an American classic.

I don't know what I was doing at the time. Probably sitting in my second-hand bookshop reading and taking no notice of the world. Blissful memories.

Without me noticing, Stoner rose from the dead, was praised by all, and in the great tradition of bookselling, after a decent passage of time, was escorted back to the grave again.

That's where I found it.

As the preface proudly declares, Stoner is the story of an unexceptional man who lives an unexceptional life - a farmer's son who becomes a lecturer at the state university. A footnote, if he is lucky. But then author John Williams leans in to take a closer look.

No novel in recent memory has elicited so many emotions from me. Reading Stoner, I was in turn desperately sad, impotent...