John Williams's Stoner

About Stoner

John Williams (1922–1994) was an American novelist and professor at the University of Denver whose three novels — Butcher's Crossing (1960), Stoner (1965), and Augustus (1972) — were all published to modest attention before his death and all subsequently rediscovered as masterpieces. Stoner is the most celebrated rediscovery: a novel about an English professor at the University of Missouri who lives a quiet, largely uneventful life and dies leaving no extraordinary legacy, published to silence in 1965 and then championed beginning in the early 2000s by scholars and writers (particularly in France and the Netherlands, where it became an international bestseller) until it became one of the most widely read American novels of the early twenty-first century. Augustus won the National Book Award in 1973; Butcher's Crossing is a brutal anti-Western. All three share Williams's quality of moral seriousness and technical precision.