About 20 years ago, Bill Crider recommended a novel to me. It was John Williams’s Stoner (1965), a novel I had heard of but didn’t own at the time. I found a copy of Stoner and read it. Stoner tells the story of a farmer’s son who goes to college initially to become a better farmer. But Stoner falls in love with Literature and switches to becoming an English Major. Needless to say, his parents are disappointed because they planned on having Stoner work on the farm and continue the operation when they got too old. Stoner’s transition to academic life and becoming a professor provides an appealing story to guys like Bill and me who followed the same career trajectory.
Charles J. Shields’s biography of John Williams covers Williams’s three marriages, his many affairs, and his feud with Yvor Winters. I was more interested in the parts that dealt with Williams’s novels. I had no idea that Western writer Nelson C. Nye panned William’s Butcher’s Crossing in The New York Times Book Review. Nye wrote: “It is practically plotless, an account of four men who go out to hunt buffalo, find them, slaughter them, and are caught by cold weather…. The story, however, contains little excitement and moves as though hauled by a snail through a pond of molasses.” (p. 121)
Stoner achieved modest success when it was first published. Yes, Stoner is far from a perfect novel. But, as the years went by, Stoner attracted more of an audience. Now, it’s considered one of the finest novels of academic life ever written. Have you read Stoner? GRADE: B
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Introduction ix
Part 1. Nothing But the Night
1. He comes from Texas 3
2. “Ho, ho! wasn’t I the character then?” 15
3. Rough draft 28
4. Key West 39
5. Alan Swallow
6. Love 58
Part 2. Butcher’s Crossing
7. The Winters Circle 73
8. “Natural liars are the best writers” 85
9. Butcher’s Crossing 100
10. Fiasco 112
Part. 3. Stoner
11. “It was that kind of world” 137
12. “The Williams affair” 153
13. Stoner 163
Part 4. Augustus
14. Bread loaf and “up on the hill” 183
15, The good guys 192
16. “Long life to the emperor!” 208
Part 5. The Sleep of Reason
Poem : “An old actor to his audience” 221
17. “How can such a son of a bitch have such talent?” 2
18. In extremis 233
Epilogue. John Williams redux 249
Acknowledgements 256
Notes 259
Works Consulted 286
A John Williams Bibliography 289
Index 297