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NYRB Classics
June 2006
On Sale: June 20, 2006
288 pages
ISBN: 1590171993
EAN: 9781590171998
Paperback
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Fiction
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.
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