Stoner

Stoner is a novel by the American writer John Williams, published on 23 April 1965 by Viking Press. It received little attention when it appeared, and interest in it grew substantially when it was reissued many years later.

The book follows one life from beginning to end. William Stoner is the son of a hard-pressed farming family, and the chance that takes him to university is meant to give him a practical trade. A lecture on a Shakespeare sonnet changes what he wants from the world, and he chooses literature, teaching and a life of study that has no money in it and no interest from his parents. The novel follows him through his graduate work, a marriage to Edith that becomes a long accommodation rather than a companionable one, his work in a university department where the politics are small-minded and damaging, and an affair with a colleague called Katherine. It is written in plain, measured prose, and the events of a person's life are given their full weight precisely because nothing about the life is extraordinary.

Williams wrote it as the second of his novels, and it is now read as one of the clearest accounts in American fiction of a man looking back at the choices that made him.