Synopses & Reviews
Born the child of a poor farmer in Missouri, William Stoner is urged by his parents to study new agriculture techniques at the state university. Digging instead into the texts of Milton and Shakespeare, Stoner falls under the spell of the unexpected pleasures of English literature, and decides to make it his life. Stoner is the story of that life.
The sorrows of William Stoner are tempered, somehow, by the demands of the daily routine. His own ordinary story is one that reflects a deep, and deeply American, loneliness. Deciding to become an academic, his career inevitably distances himself from his parents, although his position in the department is compromised by a quarrel with a more ambitious professor. His marriage to a girl from a middle class family is loveless, while a midlife love affair with a younger colleague--evoked with painful poignancy--is exposed and forced to end from outside pressures.
Williams depicts the quiet existence of a lonely man with a subtle yet ruthless honesty. The book's triumph is to make us feel this forgotten man is a hero--not out of pity or for any deed he has done, but simply for being the man he was--and he does this without a trace of sentimentality.
Stoner is a quietly emotional and heartbreaking story that will appeal to readers of Russell Banks and Tobias Wolff.
Review:
"This reprint of Williams's remarkable 1965 novel offers a window on early 20th century higher education in addition to its rich characterizations and seamless prose. Sent by his hard-scrabble farmer father to the University of Missouri to study agriculture, William Stoner is sidetracked by an obsessive love of literature and stimulated by a curmudgeonly old professor, Archer Sloane. Sloane helps Stoner avoid service in WWI, and Stoner eventually becomes an assistant professor. He then meets and marries a St. Louis beauty, Edith, who quickly subjugates her contemplative, passive husband. As decades pass, Stoner entrenches himself deep into the life of the mind, developing into a master teacher but never finding solace in the outside world. Stoner's single joy is Grace, their daughter, whom Edith appropriates as a weapon in her very personal war against Stoner's quest for inner peace. Williams (1922 — 1994) won the NBA for Augustus (1973), and NYRB will republish his western, Butch's Crossing next year. Williams's prose flows in a smooth, efficient current that demands contemplation. (July)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
Synopsis:
An eloquent depiction of dignity and defeat in an academic setting in the early 20th century Middle America.
Synopsis:
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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