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Stoner
Author	John Williams
Cover artist	Ellen Raskin
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Campus novel
Set in	Columbia, Missouri
Publisher	The Viking Press
Publication date	1965
Media type	Print (hardcover)
Pages	278
OCLC	647139
813/.54
LC Class	PZ3.W6744 St PS3545.I5286

Stoner is a 1965 novel by the American writer John Williams. It was reissued in 1972 by Pocket Books, in 2003 by Vintage^[1] and in 2006 by New York Review Books Classics with an introduction by John McGahern.^[2]

The beat goes on. It’s also important, and oddly inspiring, to recognize the shape John Williams was in when he wrote Stoner. As Charles Shields documents in his scrupulous new biography, The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel: John Williams, Stoner, and the Writing Life, Williams was not exactly burning up the charts. William Stoner entered the University of Missouri as a freshman in the year 1910, at the age of nineteen. Eight years later, during the height of World War I, he received his Doctor of Philosophy degree and accepted an instructorship at the same University, where he taught until his death in 1956.

Stoner has been categorized under the genre of the academic novel, or the campus novel.^[3]Stoner follows the life of the eponymous William Stoner, his undistinguished career and workplace politics, marriage to his wife, Edith, affair with his colleague, Katherine, and his love and pursuit of literature.

Despite receiving little attention upon its publication in 1965, Stoner has seen a sudden surge of popularity and critical praise since its republication in the 2000s.

John Williams is my choice as the most under-recognized U.S. Author — this review is an excellent look at why he is so good. I hadn’t realized until I saw the cover in the review that John McGahern (an author you and kimbofo introduced me to earlier this year) had written the introduction to this edition of Stoner — can’t say I am surprised. Stoner by Williams, John, 1922-1994. Publication date 2003 Topics Literature, English teachers, College teachers, Marital conflict, Adultery Publisher.

Plot[edit]

William Stoner is born on a small farm in 1891. After high school, the county agent advises he go to agriculture school. Stoner enrolls in the University of Missouri, where all agriculture students must take a survey course in English literature during their sophomore year. The literature he encounters in this introductory course, such as Shakespeare's Sonnet 73, opens a gateway to a new world for him, and he quickly falls in love with literary studies. Without telling his parents, Stoner quits the agriculture program and studies only the humanities. Archer Sloane, a professor, suggests to Stoner that his love of knowledge means that he should become a teacher. When his parents come for his graduation, Stoner tells them he will not be returning to the farm. He completes his MA in English and begins teaching. In graduate school, he befriends fellow students Gordon Finch and Dave Masters. Masters suggests that all three are using graduate school to avoid the real world, and that the academic life is the only life available to all three and they would be failures outside of it. World War I begins, and Gordon and Dave enlist. Stoner decides to remain in school during the war. Masters is killed in France, while Finch sees action and becomes an officer. When Stoner completes his PhD work, he is hired by the University, against its usual policy, because the war has reduced the number of faculty. When the armistice is signed, a party is held for the returning veterans, where Stoner meets an attractive young woman named Edith. Edith is reticent in the face of Stoner's advances, though agrees to his repeated visits. Very soon he proposes marriage. When her parents consent to the marriage, Edith tells Stoner she will try to be a good wife to him, and they marry a few weeks later. Finch returns from the war to the University, which gives him an administrative position and a small sinecure because of his war service.

Stoner’s marriage to Edith is bad from the start. It gradually becomes clear that Edith has profound emotional problems and treats Stoner inconsiderately throughout their marriage. Edith tries sporadically to be a homemaker and hostess, alternating between periods of intense, almost feverish activity and longer periods of indolence, indifference, and bouts of illness. After three years of marriage, Edith suddenly informs Stoner that she wants a baby. When she gets pregnant, she once again becomes uninterested in him. When their daughter Grace is born, Edith remains inexplicably bedridden for nearly a year, and Stoner largely cares for their child alone. At the university, Stoner has reworked his dissertation into a published book and is promoted to associate professor with tenure. Without consulting Stoner, Edith accepts a $6,000 loan from her father to buy a house, a loan that Stoner fears they cannot afford. Despite the additional teaching he takes on to pay off the loan, he gradually enters a happy period: He grows close with his young daughter, who spends most of her time with him in his study. Because of the larger house, Stoner's study is his retreat, which he decorates, builds furniture for, and cleans. Returning from a few months with her mother in St. Louis after Black Friday and the suicide of her father, Edith reveals that she has decided to reinvent her manner, dress, and attitude. For short periods, Edith throws herself into outside activities like community theatre, though these interests never last long. She becomes alternately inattentive and oppressive in her relationship with Grace, and Stoner gradually realizes that Edith is waging a campaign to separate him from his daughter emotionally. Edith periodically disrupts Stoner’s study, eventually throwing him out of it so she can take up sculpture, which she never does. Stoner is increasingly forced to spend his free time working at the university instead of at home. For the most part, Stoner accepts Edith's mistreatment. He begins to teach with more enthusiasm, but still, year in and year out, his marriage with Edith remains perpetually unsatisfactory and fraught. Grace becomes an unhappy, secretive child who smiles and laughs often but is emotionally hollow.

At the University, Finch becomes the acting dean of the faculty. Stoner continues to become a better teacher and wins admiration from students, though his grasp of school politics is meagre and his colleagues mostly ignore him. He feels compelled by his conscience to fail a student named Charles Walker, a close protégé of a colleague, Professor Hollis Lomax. Stoner fails Walker first in a graduate seminar and then soon afterwards on Walker’s preliminary orals. Unlike Lomax, Stoner does not believe that Walker’s verbal agility sufficiently compensates for his sparse knowledge of the literary canon. In addition, Stoner finds Walker to be lazy and dishonest, thus unsuited to graduate work. Thereafter, Lomax takes every opportunity to exact revenge upon Stoner for his intransigence on the Walker matter. Lomax begins assigning Stoner to teach the least desirable introductory classes, despite Stoner being by then one of the senior faculty members in the department. Around this time, a collaboration between Stoner and a younger instructor in the department, Katherine Driscoll, develops into a romantic love affair. Ironically, after the affair begins, Stoner’s relationships with Edith and Grace also improve. At some point, Edith finds out about the affair, but does not seem to mind it. When Lomax learns about it, however, he begins to put pressure on Katherine, who also teaches in the English department. Stoner and Driscoll agree it best to end the affair so as not to derail the academic work they both feel called to follow. Katherine quietly slips out of town, never to be seen by him again.

The summer after Katherine leaves town, Stoner becomes ill and seems to age rapidly. As world events like the Great Depression and the Spanish Civil War proceed apace, Stoner rededicates himself to his work. Once more, he sees students leaving the university to fight in war. Stoner begins presenting advanced materia

John Williams Stoner