STONER – Novel by John Edward Williams

He was born in an August day, 1922. John Edward Williams was an American author, best known for his novels Stoner. He was raised in northeast Texas, and his grandparents were farmers. He served in the Army Air Corps in Asia in World War II, becoming a sergeant. At the end of the war, he moved to Denver, Colorado and enrolled in the University of Denver, receiving Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees. Williams’ third novel, Stoner, the fictional tale of a University of Missouri English professor, was published in 1965. He was regarded as a writer who combined scholarship and language with style. Williams retired from the University of Denver in 1985 and died of respiratory failure in 1994, at home in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Perhaps, Stoner is the greatest American novel of which you’ve never heard of. Stoner has been categorized under the genre of the academic novel, or the campus novel. It wasn’t a Western. It was the story of an obscure university professor, a teacher whose life and career are steeped in disappointment and failure. The central character, William Stoner, begins as a farm boy in Missouri whose parents send him to the University of Missouri to major in agriculture. After reading Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 and influenced by his instructor, Archer Sloane, Stoner changes his major to literature and pursues a master of arts. The novel focuses on William Stoner and the central figures in his life. Those who become his enemies are used as tools against him who separate Stoner from his loves. One of the central themes in the novel is the manifestation of passion. Stoner’s passions manifest themselves into failures, as proven by the bleak end of his life. Stoner has two primary passions: knowledge and love.

https://www.amazon.com/Stoner-York-Review-Books-Classics-ebook/dp/B003K15IF8