John Williams

John Williams (1922–1994) was an American novelist and professor of creative writing at the University of Denver who published three novels to modest attention during his lifetime, all of which have subsequently been rediscovered as masterpieces. Born near Clarksville, Texas, he served in the Army Air Forces in World War II before earning his doctorate from the University of Missouri and joining the Denver faculty, where he taught for three decades and edited the literary magazine The Denver Quarterly. His debut novel, Butcher's Crossing (1960), is a brutal and unsentimental anti-Western following a Harvard man on a buffalo hunt in Kansas. Stoner (1965) — his masterpiece — follows William Stoner, the son of Missouri farmers who encounters literature in a required survey course and spends his life as a quietly passionate English teacher; published to near-silence and quickly out of print, it was championed beginning in the early 2000s by critics and writers and became an international bestseller in the 2010s, particularly in France and the Netherlands. Augustus (1972), a historical novel about the first Roman Emperor told in letters and documents, won the National Book Award. Williams edited the popular textbook English Renaissance Poetry (1963). He died in Fayetteville, Arkansas, without knowing that Stoner would eventually be recognized as one of the great American novels of the twentieth century.