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Summary
Summary
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.
Author Notes
John Williams was born in Clarksville, Texas on August 29, 1922. He enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces in 1942 and spent two and a half years as a sergeant in India and Burma. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1949 and a Master of Arts degree in 1950 from the University of Denver. During this time, his first two books were published: Nothing but the Night in 1948 and The Broken Landscape in 1949. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Missouri in 1954. He taught at the University of Denver from 1954 until his retirement in 1985. His other books include Butcher's Crossing, Stoner, and The Necessary Lie. His historical novel Augustus won the National Book Award for fiction in 1973. He also edited the anthology English Renaissance Poetry and was the founding editor of the Denver Quarterly. He died of respiratory failure on March 3, 1994.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This reprint of Williams's remarkable 1965 novel offers a window on early 20th century higher education in addition to its rich characterizations and seamless prose. Sent by his hard-scrabble farmer father to the University of Missouri to study agriculture, William Stoner is sidetracked by an obsessive love of literature and stimulated by a curmudgeonly old professor, Archer Sloane. Sloane helps Stoner avoid service in WWI, and Stoner eventually becomes an assistant professor. He then meets and marries a St. Louis beauty, Edith, who quickly subjugates her contemplative, passive husband. As decades pass, Stoner entrenches himself deep into the life of the mind, developing into a master teacher but never finding solace in the outside world. Stoner's single joy is Grace, their daughter, whom Edith appropriates as a weapon in her very personal war against Stoner's quest for inner peace. Williams (1922-1994) won the NBA for Augustus (1973), and NYRB will republish his western, Butch's Crossing next year. Williams's prose flows in a smooth, efficient current that demands contemplation. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Guardian Review
"By the author of STONER", reads the circle - it looks like a sticker, but, sadly, isn't - slapped on to the cover, the success of John Williams's 1965 novel last year being the obvious incitement to buy this one. But if you are looking for another story of a mild-mannered and stoical academic struggling against the machinations of colleagues and a terrible wife, you are going to have to look elsewhere, for Butcher's Crossing, written in 1960 and Williams's first mature novel, is far removed from the time and place of Stoner It may also be the better novel. It certainly allows itself much less freedom, concentrating on the adventures of four men on the trail of buffalo in the early 1870s in Kansas and Colorado. Butcher's Crossing itself is the most rudimentary of towns: its barbershop is basically a tent with a sign saying "JOE LONG, BARBAR". This little joke - the allusion to barbarity - is, apart perhaps from the title, about the only self-consciously literary flourish in the novel's 326 pages, and it may not even be deliberate. But if it is, its deadpan characteristic is of a piece with the taut discipline and rigour of the prose. Into this almost literally one-horse town comes a young man, Will Andrews, who has left Harvard, drawn to the west in order to find "his unalterable self" (the phrase comes at the end of the book, when what has happened to him gives it a certain degree of irony). Weary of Boston, he has come to seek something in nature - this is more or less the hero of Stoner's journey in reverse. We may be approaching the final quarter of the 19th century - far to the east, Henry James has already started writing novels - but Butcher's Crossing is very much the wild west, although a west on the brink of change. The railroad is coming, it is said, and there are fewer and fewer buffalo about (and the few Indians left are not worth bothering with). Still, all the familiar elements remain: the rough-hewn men, the choice in the bar of either beer or gut-rot whiskey, and the hooker with the heart of gold. Will Andrews sets himself up with a man called Miller, an expert on the ways of the wild. Miller is a frontiersman who has seen evidence of one of the last great herds of buffalo, over the mountains by the Colorado River in a part of the world where no man has set foot. Several thousand skins, at three or four dollars a hide, could make the men who find them and bring them back wealthy. Andrews hands over his money to finance the expedition, and we're off, along with Charley Hoge - one-handed since a previous rather hairy expedition, and dependent on his tattered Bible and steady supply of corn whiskey - and Fred Schneider, who will be doing most of the skinning, with a brief to teach the neophyte Andrews on the job. The western may not be your cup of tea. It is not really mine. I am not Cormac McCarthy's greatest fan: out west, he overwrites horribly, if it is not heresy to say so. But Williams, in reducing the elements of his story to nothing more than close attention to events, has produced something timeless and great. And in its pitiless depiction of men reduced to the most basic and extreme of situations - thirst, cold, heat, exhaustion, isolation, not to mention the undesirability of each other's company - this book very nicely fits into the contemporary vogue for survival-manual entertainment as exemplified by films such as Gravity and All Is Lost. You learn, from the beginning, the nature of the very dust in a settlement like Butcher's Crossing; by the end, you will have more than a rough idea of how to skin a buffalo, and quite a few about how to survive in the wilderness. The best advice, though, might be to bring someone like Miller along with you, or stay at home. "You can't deal with this country as long as you're in it; it's too big, and empty," we read towards the end; but the country that is really being talked about, we come dimly to appreciate, is the one we're all in. Butcher's Crossing by John Williams (Vintage, pounds 8.99) To order Butcher's Crossing for pounds 7.19 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk. - Nicholas Lezard The western may not be your cup of tea. It is not really mine. I am not Cormac McCarthy's greatest fan: out west, he overwrites horribly, if it is not heresy to say so. But [John Williams], in reducing the elements of his story to nothing more than close attention to events, has produced something timeless and great. And in its pitiless depiction of men reduced to the most basic and extreme of situations - thirst, cold, heat, exhaustion, isolation, not to mention the undesirability of each other's company - this book very nicely fits into the contemporary vogue for survival-manual entertainment as exemplified by films such as Gravity and All Is Lost. You learn, from the beginning, the nature of the very dust in a settlement like [Butcher]'s Crossing; by the end, you will have more than a rough idea of how to skin a buffalo, and quite a few about how to survive in the wilderness. The best advice, though, might be to bring someone like Miller along with you, or stay at home. "You can't deal with this country as long as you're in it; it's too big, and empty," we read towards the end; but the country that is really being talked about, we come dimly to appreciate, is the one we're all in. - Nicholas Lezard.
