Discover an American masterpiece. This unassuming story about the life of a quiet English professor has earned the admiration of readers all over the globe.
 
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.