Author Bio
• Birth—August 29, 1922
• Where—northeast Texas, USA
• Death—March 3, 1994
• Where—Fayetteville, Arkansas
• Education—B.A., M.A., University of Denver; Ph.D., University of Missouri
• Awards—National Book Award
John Edward Williams was an American author, editor, and professor. He was best known for his novels Stoner (1965) and Augustus (1972). The latter won a U.S. National Book Award.
Early life
Williams was raised in northeast Texas. His grandparents were farmers; his stepfather was a janitor in a post office. Despite a talent for writing and acting, Williams flunked out of a local junior college after his first year. He worked with newspapers and radio stations in the Southwest for a year, then reluctantly joined the war effort by enlisting in the United States Army Air Force early in 1942. He spent two and a half years as a sergeant in India and Burma. During his enlistment, he wrote a draft of his first novel, which was published in 1948.
Education and writing
At the end of the war Williams moved to Denver, Colorado and enrolled in the University of Denver, receiving Bachelor of Arts (1949) and Master of Arts (1950) degrees. During his time at the University of Denver, his first two books were published, Nothing But the Night (1948), a novel depicting the terror and waywardness resulting from an early traumatic experience, and The Broken Landscape (1949), a collection of poetry.
Upon completing his MA, Williams enrolled at the University of Missouri, teaching and working on his Ph.D. in English Literature, which he obtained in 1954.
Teaching and writing
In the fall of 1955 Williams returned to the University of Denver as Assistant Professor, becoming director of the creative writing program. His second novel, Butcher's Crossing (1960) depicts frontier life in 1870's Kansas. He edited and wrote the introduction for the anthology English Renaissance Poetry in 1963. His second book of poems, The Necessary Lie (1965), was issued by Verb Publications. He was the founding editor of the University of Denver Quarterly (later Denver Quarterly), which was first issued in 1965. He remained as editor until 1970.
Williams' third novel, Stoner (1965), is the fictional tale of a University of Missouri English professor. A year later the book was out of print, but it was reissued in 2003 and again in 2006. His fourth novel, Augustus (1972), a rendering of the violent times of Augustus Caesar in Rome, remains in print. It won the National Book Award for Fiction, which it shared with Chimera by John Barth (the first time the award was split).
Williams loved the study of literature. When asked in a 1985 interview whether literature should be entertaining, his response was emphatic: "Absolutely. My God, to read without joy is stupid."
Retirement and death
In 1985, Williams retired from the University of Denver. He died of respiratory failure in 1994, at his home in Fayetteville, Arkansas. He was survived by his wife and descendants. A fifth novel, The Sleep of Reason, was unfinished at the time of his death and never published.
Critical response
Critic Morris Dickstein called the 1965 Stoner "something rarer than a great novel—it is a perfect novel, so well told and beautifully written, so deeply moving, it takes your breath away."
He also noted that, while Butcher's Crossing, Stoner, and Augustus are "strikingly different in subject," they "show a similar narrative arc: a young man's initiation, vicious male rivalries, subtler tensions between men and women, fathers and daughters, and finally a bleak sense of disappointment, even futility."
Novelist and scientist C.P. Snow wrote of Stoner: "Why isn’t this book famous?… Very few novels in English, or literary productions of any kind, have come anywhere near its level for human wisdom or as a work of art."
In his introduction to the 2006 edition of Stoner, author John McGahern wrote,
There is entertainment of a very high order to be found in Stoner, what Williams himself describes as "an escape into reality" as well as pain and joy. The clarity of the prose is in itself an unadulterated joy.
Steve Almond praises Stoner in the New York Times Magazine, writing, "I had never encountered a work so ruthless in its devotion to human truths and so tender in its execution. (Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 11/29/2015.)