John Williams's Stoner Reading Order

John Williams's Stoner (1965) is perhaps the greatest example of a rediscovered American novel — published to minimal attention in 1965, quietly out of print for decades, and then championed in the early 2000s by scholars and writers (most consequentially by the critic Morris Dickstein and the novelist Ian McEwan) until it became an international bestseller in the 2010s, particularly in France, the Netherlands, and Germany, where it sold hundreds of thousands of copies and was treated as the great American novel its author never received. The novel follows William Stoner, born to Missouri farmers, who encounters literature in a required survey course at the University of Missouri, falls in love with language, and spends his life as a quietly passionate English teacher who fails at marriage, has one brief love affair, fights one long professional battle, and dies at his desk — leaving no extraordinary legacy. The novel's subject is the dignity of an ordinary intellectual life, lived without fame or vindication, and its extraordinary achievement is to make that life feel heroic without falsifying it.