Stoner
By: John Williams ; introduction by John McGahern.
Edition: 6th printing
Series: NYRB Classics
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2006
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Format: Trade Paperback
Number of pages: 278
ISBN-13: 9781590171998
Copyright date: 1965, 2003
Subjects: Literature -- Study and teaching -- Fiction.; English teachers -- Fiction.; College teachers -- Fiction.; Marital conflict -- Fiction.; Adultery -- Fiction.; Middle West -- Fiction.
Genres: Fiction.
First sentence: This book is dedicated to my friends and former colleagues in the Department of English at the University of Missouri.
Description: William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.

John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.
--back cover
Notes: US / CAN