In December 2013, the Guardian ran a review by Julian Barnes on his favorite novel of the year with the headline "Stoner: The Must-Read Novel of 2013." What was most interesting about this assertion is that the book which Barnes was reviewing was published in 1964. Not written in 1965, mind you. Published.
Mere weeks earlier, the New Yorker also ran a review of the same novel, Stoner, by John Williams. (Not the John Williams who is nominated for an Oscar for composing movie scores every year). The headline of this review was “The Greatest American Novel You’ve Never Heard Of.
Pretty heady stuff for a novel published before even the Beatles had heard of Sgt. Pepper and which promptly went out of print a year later. Even disregarding the time, it would be quite a feat for a novel such as Stoner to take the world by storm the way that it suddenly seemed to be everywhere in 2013. The protagonist of the novel was born in 1891 and grows up to marry a frigid agoraphobe before they produce a child and his career is that of the exciting college instructor. The action covers both World Wars and the Great Depression and concludes with a death by old age. Not exactly the kind of content that lights up Amazon sales figures.
And, indeed, American book buyers have yet to embrace Stoner with quite the transformative ferocity of European readers. Those readers across the pond were the force that resurrected Williams’ novel from the dead and turned it into a bona fide 21st century. That alone would be ironic since literary sensations seem almost on the verge of extinction in the age of the internet unless they contain much salacious details about far more notorious lives than that of the English professor called Stoner.
In late 2017, it was announced that Casey Affleck would portray the title character in a film adaptation.
