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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9781590171998
ISBN number: 1590171993
Label: NYRB Classics
Manufacturer: NYRB Classics
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 288
Printing Date: June 20, 2006
Publishing house: NYRB Classics
Release Date: June 20, 2006
Sale Popularity Level: 12992
Studio: NYRB Classics
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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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Rated by buyers 
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We should all thank the New York Review Books Classic for re-releasing this extraordinary novel. Perhaps one of the toughest things a novelist can do is make an ordinary life fascinating. This is is the brilliance of such writers as Chekov, Carver and Pym. It is also at the center of John Williams' "Stoner." I had never heard of the novel until a friend recommended it to me. I was stunned at how good it was given its relative obscurity. The prose is as crystal clear as Willa Cather's writing at its best. I've already ordered his other books. This is one of the very best books I've read in recent memory.
Rated by buyers -
For a short novel, Stoner has the feeling of a much longer work. Perhaps part of this is the unremitting melancholy which Williams attaches to the main character, William Stoner. A kind of Everyman who sets out on the course of higher education, Stoner never quite fits the bill of the academic super star he wants himself to be; yet he continues to struggle, to write a book, to be a better teacher, to be closer to his wife and daughter. In the end, Williams' great accomplishment in this novel is his unflinching ability to show all sides of his characters. In Stoner, even minor characters have a rounded feel. And Stoner, the character, through all his struggles, remains appealing.
This work, a "typical" novel about college life, somehow never falls to the level of the banal or expected. Williams' great achievement is to make the college a legitimate arena for the human experience to unfold without staleness. Rather than showing a lack of experience on Williams behalf (read Augustus to see this man's great range) Williams illustrates in Stoner that ANY area of human life can be subject to scrupulous literary exploration, even one so over ploughed as the college campus.
Rated by buyers 
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If you define a hero as someone who doesn't shoot his wife, child and self when it's really what ought to be done -- because not a one of them takes any charge of his or her own life -- then ok, William Stoner is your hero. But not mine.
Consider: perhaps the only time in his life that Stoner showed some gumption was when he was about 20. He switched majors from Agriculture to Literature, thus changing the course of his life. But after that, it's all down hill.
Nowadays, the woman he ended up marrying would be labelled clinically depressed. In Shakespeare's time, she'd have been called a shrew in dire need of taming. But Stoner's time was neither now nor the Middle Ages. And so he spends the remaining 45 years of his wretched life sleeping on the couch, banished from his wife's bed, unable to stand up to her even when she spends her days thinking up new ways to screw with the psyche of their one and only child.
And this is a hero?
And work doesn't go much better -- he gets pushed around there, too.
In the real world, quietly suffering dolts like Stoner usually end up making back-page news in the Kansas City Star: they buy a .38 at WalMart one hot summer's night, then come home and calmly blow away their family before turning the gun on themselves.
But no, our Stoner is a hero, see, because he takes the cards life's dealt him. But why, one really must ask, does he never ask the dealer for a hit?
Rated by buyers -
One of the best works of fiction of the post war era. Williams does not get his propers. He is a little-known literary giant who deserves wide readership.
Rated by buyers -
William Stoner is the only child of Midwestern farmers struggling to eke out an existence. One of the local elders mentions that the University of Missouri is offering a college degree in Agriculture and he suggests that the son consider it. Never having traveled outside of his farming community, William decides to attend college in 1910. He lives with relatives and pays for his room and board by feeding the animals and slopping pigs in the morning, going to school during the day, back to back-breaking farm work when he returns from school...and then staying up late at night to do his studies. He takes a mandatory literature course in his second year of studies which opens his mind and heart to learning, higher education and life's possibilities - and Stoner both finds himself and loses himself in books, literature and eventually teaching.
Stoner's storytelling is crisp and visual:
"He buried her (his Mother) beside his husband. After the services were over and the few mourners had gone, he stood alone in a cold November wind and looked at the two graves, one open to its burden and the other mound covered by a thin fuzz of grass. He turned on the bare, treeless little plot that held others like his mother and father and looked across the flat land in the direction of the farm where he had been born, where his mother and father had spent their years. He thought of the cost exacted, year after year, by the soil; and it remained as it had been - a little more barren, perhaps, a little more frugal of increase. Nothing had changed. Their lives had been expended in cheerless labor, their wills broken, their intelligences numbed. Now they were in the earth to which they had given their lives; and slowly, year by year, the earth would take them."
The death of his parents - a failed marriage - a mentally unstable wife who takes it out on William and their Daughter Grace - a vindictive Department Head of Literature who makes Stoners' professional life miserable - - and on and on as captured beautifully by Jefferson in this phrase:
"The years of the war blurred together, and Stoner went through them as he might have gone through a driving and nearly unendurable storm, his head down, his jaw locked, his mind fixed upon the subsequent step and the subsequent and the next."
This story of an ordinary man who finds his passion in his professional life and yet is still beset with challenges within that life and in living.
John Williams wrote this novel in 1965 - it still merits the "perfect novel" acclaim attributed to it by many reviewers. This novel is deeply moving.
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