Stoner: A Novel
About this audiobook
This is the story of a quiet man, destined to be a farmer but who becomes an academic. It is book in which nothing and everything happens and is possibly the greatest novel you've never read.
William Stoner enters the University of Missouri at nineteen to study agriculture. A seminar on English literature changes his life, and he never returns to work on his father's farm. Stoner becomes a teacher. He marries the wrong woman. His life is quiet, and after his death, his colleagues remember him rarely.
Yet with truthfulness, compassion and intense power, this novel uncovers a story of universal value - of the conflicts, defeats and victories of the human race that pass unrecorded by history - and in doing so reclaims the significance of an individual life.
'It's simply a novel about a guy who goes to college and becomes a teacher. But its one of the most fascinating things that you've ever come across' Tom Hanks, Time
'A beautiful, sad, utterly convincing account of an entire life' Ian McEwan
'A brilliant, beautiful, inexorably sad, wise and elegant novel' Nick Hornby
© John Williams 1965 (P) Penguin Audio 2016
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About the author
John Williams was born on August 29, 1922 in Clarksville, Texas. He served in the United States Army Air Force from 1942 to 1945 in China, Burma and India. The Swallow Press published his first novel, Nothing But the Night, in 1948, as well as his first book of poems, The Broken Landscape, in 1949. Macmillan published Williams' second novel, Butcher's Crossing, in 1960.
After recieving his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Denver, and his Ph.D from the University of Missouri, Williams returned in 1954 to the University of Denver where he taught literature and the craft of writing for thirty years. In 1963 Williams received a fellowship to study at Oxford University where where he received a Rockefeller grant enabling him to travel and research in Italy for his last novel, Augustus, published in 1972. John Williams died in Arkansas on March 4, 1994.
