John Williams's 1965 novel tells an ordinary life in plain, exact prose, and it argues by example that such a life deserves full attention. William Stoner, the son of poor Missouri farmers, enrolls at the University of Missouri in 1910 to study agriculture. A required survey of English literature changes his course. Struggling to say what Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 means, prodded by his teacher Archer Sloane, he finds a vocation he can hardly explain and never goes back to the farm. The rest of the book follows him through decades as an unremarkable assistant professor. He marries Edith, a brittle and unhappy woman who slowly turns their daughter Grace against him. He spends years in a petty departmental feud with Hollis Lomax, which begins when he refuses to pass a glib, unprepared graduate student. In middle age he has a brief, tender love affair with a young instructor, Katherine Driscoll, and gives it up under pressure. He dies of cancer, his books unread and his name soon forgotten.
There is little plot and no great drama, yet the novel is absorbing because Williams treats work, love, loyalty and endurance with complete seriousness. Stoner is passive in some ways and stubborn in others: he can't defend himself at home, but he won't bend on what he believes teaching requires. Williams was himself a professor at the University of Denver and wrote the novel from inside academic life. Barely noticed when it first appeared, Stoner found a large international readership after its reissue decades later. It is a quiet, unsentimental meditation on whether a life can be judged a failure by its outward record, and on the private dignity of loving something for its own sake.