Description

Author/Contributor(s):	Williams, John; McGahern, John
Publisher:	NYRB Classics
Date:	7/30/2019
Binding:	Hardcover
Condition:	NEW

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 Missourifarming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead fallsin love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different fromthe hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encountersa succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him fromhis 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 deeperwithin himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confrontsan essential solitude.

John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is awork of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypalAmerican, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a paintingby Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.