The ultimate success of some books cannot be explained. There are many overnight sensations that are forgotten by the following year. Rarely, however, do we find a book that was written more than 50 years earlier that has gone out of print and then inexplicitly becomes an international bestseller. Especially when the book is about the academic life and one man’s journey from the farmland to the academy.

Stoner (1965 and reprinted in several editions) by John Williams has been described as a novel in which nothing happens and everything happens. William Stoner is raised on a hardscrabble farm and that life seems his destiny. Then his father suggests he go to the University of Missouri to study agriculture. Surprisingly, he finds he has to take a class on English literature and in the experience embraces a scholar’s life. A mentor points out the obvious to him: that he will be a teacher because he has “fallen in love. It’s as simple as that.” And yet as the years pass in this career he loves, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: from an unfulfilling marriage to academic infighting, from the loss of the affection of his daughter to new love that threatens to embroil him in scandal. His last few years are spent embracing the silence and solitude of his forebearers.

Through it all Williams writes with a clarity and style that is a joy to read. One page leads to the next and then the next and suddenly this book about a midwestern academic of the mid-20th century has captured your mind and soul. By the final pages Stoner may never leave you.

Williams has a religious reverence for education and literature, and it shows in the care in which he constructs this tale of the academic’s life. Some have called this a quiet novel, and that’s an apt description. Even in the well-written passages when Stoner falls in love with a fellow professor, the passion and chemistry are crafted with care and love.

There is a universality to William Stoner that can be both comforting and very sad at the same time. The person who recommended it to me (the owner of my barber shop, no less) said he was sobbing at the end of the book. I had a similar, though not quite so dramatic, reaction. I didn’t weep, but I did connect.

Stoner has been described as “the greatest American novel you’ve never read.” It is certainly worth your time.

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo credit: University of Missouri