William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt‎-poor Missouri farming family‎.‎ Sent to the state university to study agronomy‎,‎ he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar‎'‎s life‎,‎ so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known‎.‎ And yet as the years pass‎,‎ Stoner encounters a succession 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.‎ John Williams‎'‎s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection‎.‎ William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American‎,‎ but as an unlikely existential hero‎,‎ standing‎,‎ like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper‎,‎ in stark relief against an unforgiving world‎.‎