When John Williams's novel Stoner was published in 1965, it sold fewer than 2,000 copies and went out of print a year later. Williams died in 1994 at age 71, having published three other novels to mixed critical and commercial reception. His highest accolades were for Augustus, historical fiction about the Roman emperor, which shared the 1973 National Book Award for Fiction with John Barth's Chimera. 
Stoner languished in obscurity until John Doyle, of Crawford Doyle Booksellers in New York City, recommended the novel to a New York Review of Books editor. NYRB Classics republished Stoner in 2006. Since then, Williams's once-forgotten novel has achieved astounding success. Critics have hailed it as a rediscovered treasure and lost masterpiece. Bret Easton Ellis said Stoner is "one of the great unheralded 20th-century American novels." Ian McEwan called it "a beautiful, sad, utterly convincing account of an entire life."
That life is of William Stoner, born in the late 1800s to a poor farming family in Missouri. His parents send him to study agriculture at the University of Missouri, but Stoner instead falls in love with literature. He pursues a doctorate, becomes an assistant professor of English and starts a family. The novel follows Stoner through his undistinguished academic career and familial estrangement. He turns at last to love outside his marriage and finds a stoic strength within himself.
This month NYRB Classics published a 50th anniversary edition of Stoner, which includes letters written between Williams and his agent Marie Rodell about the novel and difficulties finding a publisher, and an introduction by Irish author John McGahern. NYRB Classics has also republished Williams's 1960 novel Butcher's Crossing, a western about a buffalo hunting expedition, and Augustus. --Tobias Mutter
