Book description
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.
John Williams was born on August 29, 1922 in Clarksville, Texas.
He served in the United States Army Air Force from 1942 to 1945 in
China, Burma and India. The Swallow Press published his first novel,
Nothing But the Night, in 1948, as well as his first book of
poems, The Broken Landscape, in 1949. Macmillan published
Williams' second novel, Butcher's Crossing, in 1960.
After recieving his B. A. and M. A. from the University of Denver,
and his Ph. D from the University of Missouri, Williams returned in
1954 to the University of Denver where he taught literature and the
craft of writing for thirty years. In 1963 Williams received a
fellowship to study at Oxford University where where he received a
Rockefeller grant enabling him to travel and research in Italy for his
last novel, Augustus, published in 1972. John Williams died in
Arkansas on March 4, 1994.
