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Stoner (novel)Stoner is a 1965 novel by the American writer John Williams. It was reissued in 1972 by Pocket Books, in 2003 by Vintage and in 2006 by New York Review Books Classics with an introduction by John McGahern.

Stoner has been categorized under the genre of the academic novel, or the campus novel. Stoner follows the life of the eponymous William Stoner, his undistinguished career and workplace politics, marriage to his wife, Edith, affair with his colleague, Katherine, and his love and pursuit of literature.

Despite receiving little attention upon its publication in 1965, Stoner has seen a sudden surge of popularity and critical praise since its republication in the 2000s.

Plot

William Stoner is born on a small farm in 1891. After high school, the county agent advises he go to agriculture school. Stoner enrolls in the University of Missouri, where all agriculture students must take a survey course in English literature during their sophomore year. The literature he encounters in this introductory course, such as Shakespeare's Sonnet 73, opens a gateway to a new world for him, and he quickly falls in love with literary studies. Without telling his parents, Stoner quits the agriculture program and studies only the humanities. Archer Sloane, a professor, suggests to Stoner that his love of knowledge means that he should become a teacher. When his parents come for his graduation, Stoner tells them he will not be returning to the farm. He completes his MA in English and begins teaching. In graduate school, he befriends fellow students Gordon Finch and Dave Masters. Masters suggests that all three are using graduate school to avoid the real world, and that the academic life is the only life available to all three and they would be failures outside of it. World War I begins, and Gordon and Dave enlist. Stoner decides to remain in school during the war. Masters is killed in France, while Finch sees action and becomes an officer. When Stoner completes his PhD work, he is hired by the University, against its usual policy, because the war has reduced the number of faculty. When the armistice is signed, a party is held for the returning veterans, where Stoner meets an attractive young woman named Edith. Edith is reticent in the face of Stoner's advances, though agrees to his repeated visits. Very soon he proposes marriage. When her parents consent to the marriage, Edith tells Stoner she will try to be a good wife to him, and they marry a few weeks later. Finch returns from the war to the University, which gives him an administrative position and a small sinecure because of his war service.

Stoner�s marriage to Edith is bad from the start. It gradually becomes clear that Edith has profound emotional problems and treats Stoner inconsiderately throughout their marriage. Edith tries sporadically to be a homemaker and hostess, alternating between periods of intense, almost feverish activity and longer periods of indolence, indifference, and bouts of illness. After three years of marriage, Edith suddenly informs Stoner that she wants a baby. When she gets pregnant, she once again becomes uninterested in him. When their daughter Grace is born, Edith remains inexplicably bedridden for nearly a year, and Stoner largely cares for their child alone. At the university, Stoner has reworked his dissertation into a published book and is promoted to associate professor with tenure. Without consulting Stoner, Edith accepts a ,000 loan from her father to buy a house, a loan that Stoner fears they cannot afford. Despite the additional teaching he takes on to pay off the loan, he gradually enters a happy period: He grows close with his young daughter, who spends most of her time with him in his study. Because of the larger house, Stoner's study is his retreat, which he decorates, builds furniture for, and cleans. Returning from a few months with her mother in St. Louis after Black Friday and the suicide of her father, Edith reveals that she has decided to reinvent her manner, dress, and attitude. For short periods, Edith throws herself into outside activities like community theatre, though these interests never last long. She becomes alternately inattentive and oppressive in her relationship with Grace, and Stoner gradually realizes that Edith is waging a campaign to separate him from his daughter emotionally. Edith periodically disrupts Stoner�s study, eventually throwing him out of it so she can take up sculpture, which she never does. Stoner is increasingly forced to spend his free time working at the university instead of at home. For the most part, Stoner accepts Edith's mistreatment. He begins to teach with more enthusiasm, but still, year in and year out, his marriage with Edith remains perpetually unsatisfactory and fraught. Grace becomes an unhappy, secretive child who smiles and laughs often but is emotionally hollow.

At the University, Finch becomes the acting dean of the faculty. Stoner continues to become a better teacher and wins admiration from students, though his grasp of school politics is meagre and his colleagues mostly ignore him. He feels compelled by his conscience to fail a student named Charles Walker, a close prot�g� of a colleague, Professor Hollis Lomax. Stoner fails Walker first in a graduate seminar and then soon afterwards on Walker�s preliminary orals. Unlike Lomax, Stoner does not believe that Walker�s verbal agility sufficiently compensates for his sparse knowledge of the literary canon. In addition, Stoner finds Walker to be lazy and dishonest, thus unsuited to graduate work. Thereafter, Lomax takes every opportunity to exact revenge upon Stoner for his intransigence on the Walker matter. Lomax begins assigning Stoner to teach the least desirable introductory classes, despite Stoner being by then one of the senior faculty members in the department. Around this time, a collaboration between Stoner and a younger instructor in the department, Katherine Driscoll, develops into a romantic love affair. Ironically, after the affair begins, Stoner�s relationships with Edith and Grace also improve. At some point, Edith finds out about the affair, but does not seem to mind it. When Lomax learns about it, however, he begins to put pressure on Katherine, who also teaches in the English department. Stoner and Driscoll agree it best to end the affair so as not to derail the academic work they both feel called to follow. Katherine quietly slips out of town, never to be seen by him again.

The summer after Katherine leaves town, Stoner becomes ill and seems to age rapidly. As world events like the Great Depression and the Spanish Civil War proceed apace, Stoner rededicates himself to his work. Once more, he sees students leaving the university to fight in war. Stoner begins presenting advanced material to incoming first-year students. Lomax is limited in his ability to counter this, as general University policy involves each teacher having absolute authority over their coursework. After Finch, who by now has become a full dean and is one of the most powerful people on campus, laughs at Lomax's attempts to sabotage Stoner, Lomax finally relents and begins to assign Stoner advanced classes again. Stoner, older now and hard of hearing, though still a better teacher than most of his colleagues, is beginning to become a legendary figure in the English department. He begins to spend more time at home, ignoring Edith's signs of displeasure at his presence. Grace, meanwhile, 17 and a high school senior, begins to socialize more. Stoner has been saving money for Grace to attend an Eastern college, but Edith will not hear of Grace going away, and forces Grace to enroll at the University of Missouri. The following year, Grace announces she is pregnant. Her mother takes Grace�s pregnancy very badly, but Stoner is supportive. Grace marries the father of her child five days after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Grace�s husband enlists in the army, and dies before the baby is born. Grace goes to St. Louis with the baby to live with her husband's parents. She visits Stoner and Edith occasionally, and Stoner realizes that Grace has developed a drinking problem.

As Stoner�s mandatory retirement age is approaching, he wishes to continue teaching as long as possible, though Lomax offers him a promotion to retire early. Stoner learns that he has cancer and must retire immediately. As Stoner�s life is coming to an end, his daughter Grace comes to visit him. Deeply unhappy and addicted to alcohol, Grace half-heartedly tries to reconcile with Stoner, and he sees that his daughter, like her mother, will never be happy. When Grace leaves, Stoner feels as though the young child that he loved died long ago. Gordon Finch visits Stoner almost daily, but when Stoner brings up Dave Masters, Finch withdraws internally from the dying Stoner. Stoner thinks back over his life. The pain medication that he is taking sometimes makes it difficult to think clearly. He thinks about where he failed, and wonders if he could have been more loving to Edith, if he could have been stronger or if he could have helped her more. Later, he believes that he is wrong to think of himself as failing. During an afternoon when he is all alone, he sees various young students passing by on their way to class outside his window, and dies while touching a copy of the one book that he published years earlier as a young professor.

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