"Born the child of a poor farmer in Missouri, William Stoner is urged by his parents to study new agriculture techniques at the state university. Digging instead into the texts of Milton and Shakespeare, Stoner falls under the spell of the unexpected pleasures of English literature, and decides to make it his life. Stoner is the story of that life"--Publisher description (January 2007).

William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to a university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar's life. As the years pass, Stoner encounters a series 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. William Stoner emerges not only as an archetypal American but as an unlikely existential hero, standing in stark relief against an unforgiving world.

"Born the child of a poor farmer in Missouri, William Stoner is urged by his parents to study new agriculture techniques at the state university. Digging instead into the texts of Milton and Shakespeare, Stoner falls under the spell of the unexpected pleasures of English literature, and decides to make it his life. Stoner is the story of that life"--Publisher description (January 2007).

As the spirit of experimentation swirled around him in the 1960s and '70s, John Williams, working in relative obscurity as an English professor, wrote finely crafted novels distinguished by precise form, powerful but restrained prose, and close attention to physical detail and its symbolic import. His three major works Butcher's Crossing (1960), Stoner (1965), and the National Book Award-winning Augustus (1972) have come to be recognized as masterpieces of American fiction. This authoritative Library of America volume brings all three together for the first time, along with editor Daniel Mendelsohn's selection of essays in which Williams reflects on the context of his work.