Stoner
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.
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The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
William Stoner walks off a Missouri farm in 1910 to study agriculture, falls in love with English literature, and stays at the University of Missouri for the next forty years through one quiet, deeply lived life.
Yes. Stoner was originally published in 1965 to little attention. It was rediscovered in the 2000s after a New York Review Books reissue and a Tim Kreider essay in The New Yorker, and is now widely considered one of the great American novels.
No, despite the title. Stoner is the surname of the protagonist William Stoner, an English literature professor in early 20th-century Missouri. The novel is about quiet endurance through an unremarkable academic life.
Stoner was written by John Williams, published in 1965 by Vintage Books.
Stoner is 291 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Stoner takes most readers 4 to 6 hours to finish.
Stoner is a standalone novel by John Williams, not part of a series.
Stoner is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.