John Edward Williams

Born on 29 August 1922 in Clarksville, Texas, and raised in Wichita Falls, an oil-boom town where his stepfather tried and failed to find his fortune, John Edward Williams dropped out of a local junior college after failing freshman English , an irony he would later relish. He drifted through radio work and newspaper jobs before enlisting in the United States Army Air Forces in early 1942, spending two and a half years as a sergeant in the China-Burma-India theater. After the war, the G.I. Bill carried him to the University of Denver, where he earned a B.A. in 1949 and an M.A. in 1950, and then to the University of Missouri for a Ph.D. in 1954. He published his first novel, Nothing but the Night (1948), while still an undergraduate, and would later disown it. In 1955, he took over the creative writing program at the University of Denver, where he taught for more than three decades. Butcher’s Crossing (1960), an anti-Western about a buffalo hunt that strips away every frontier myth, sold poorly but earned quiet admiration. Stoner (1965), the story of an unremarkable English professor at a Midwestern university , his failed marriage, his small academic battles, his one great love , was reviewed politely and vanished. Augustus (1972), an epistolary novel about the first Roman emperor, shared the National Book Award with John Barth’s Chimera. Williams retired from teaching in 1985 and died in Fayetteville, Arkansas, on 3 March 1994, having published only four novels in forty-six years. Stoner was reissued by New York Review Books Classics in 2006 and became an international phenomenon , the rare posthumous vindication of a writer whose faith in quiet, precise prose proved more durable than the noise that drowned it out.