Before John Williams lets us know William Stoner, he makes sure we understand how the world has forgotten him. The opening pages of Williams’s 1965 novel, Stoner, describe a modest medieval manuscript donated to the University of Missouri library in the title character’s memory. Students occasionally encounter his name on the bookplate and wonder who he was. His colleagues remember him, but seldom for long.
By most conventional measures of success, Stoner’s life appears unremarkable. Born to poor farmers in rural Missouri in 1891, he is sent to university to study agriculture, encounters English literature almost accidentally, and abandons the soil for the classroom. He marries Edith, with whom he develops an increasingly miserable relationship; has one daughter, Grace, whom he loves but gradually loses; and publishes a single scholarly book of modest consequence. In middle age, he discovers profound love in an affair with a younger scholar, only to relinquish it under institutional pressure. An academic dispute damages his career. He grows old, becomes ill, retires, and dies. He never becomes famous or wealthy, and the university to which he devotes his entire adult life doesn’t bother to remember him.
Yet, over roughly three hundred pages, Williams makes this apparently inconsequential life feel deeply meaningful and relatable. When Stoner first appeared, it received respectful reviews but negligible sales, and its rediscovery came decades later, particularly after a 2006 New York Review Books reissue and an extraordinary revival among European readers. A largely forgotten novel about a largely forgotten professor gradually became a modern classic.
