John Edward Williams

Williams was raised in Clarksville, Texas.[1] His grandparents were farmers; his stepfather was a janitor in a post office. Despite showing an early talent for writing and acting, Williams dropped 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, enlisting in the United States Army Air Force early in 1942, and spending two and a half years as a sergeant in India and Burma. During his enlistment in Calcutta, he wrote pages of a novel, which later became Nothing But the Night, published in 1948 by Swallow Press and later reissued by New York Review Books Classics.[3]

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, where he taught and worked on his Ph.D. in English literature, which he obtained in 1954. In the fall of 1955, Williams returned to the University of Denver as an Assistant Professor, becoming director of the creative-writing program. His second novel, Butcher's Crossing (Macmillan, 1960) depicts frontier life in 1870s Kansas.[4]

In 1963, Williams edited and wrote the introduction for the anthology English Renaissance Poetry: A Collection of Shorter Poems from Skelton to Jonson (Doubleday). The publication elicited a backlash from poet and literary critic Yvor Winters who claimed that Williams's anthology overlapped with his canon and the introduction imitated his arguments. The publishers agreed to include an acknowledgement to Winters in the publication.[3]

Williams's second collection of poems, The Necessary Lie (1965), was issued by Verb Publications. He was the founding editor of the University of Denver Quarterly[1] (later Denver Quarterly), which was first issued in 1965. He remained as editor until 1970.

His third novel, Stoner, detailing the tragic life of a University of Missouri English Assistant Professor, was published by Viking Press in 1965. It was reissued in 2005 by NYRB Classics to widespread critical acclaim.[5] It was subsequently translated and published throughout Europe and beginning in 2011, became a best seller in France, the Netherlands, Italy, Israel and the UK.[3]

His fourth novel, Augustus (Viking, 1972), a rendering of the violent times of Augustus Caesar in Rome, also remains in print. On the year of its release, it shared the National Book Award for Fiction with Chimera by John Barth, the first time that the award was split.[2]

Williams retired from the University of Denver in 1985 and died of respiratory failure in 1994 at home in Fayetteville, Arkansas. He is survived by his wife and descendants.[1] A fifth novel, The Sleep of Reason, was unfinished at the time of his death, but two lengthy excerpts were published in Ploughshares and the Denver Quarterly in 1981 and 1986, respectively.

Williams loved the study of literature. In a 1986 interview, he was asked, "And literature is written to be entertaining?" to which he replied emphatically, "Absolutely. My God, to read without joy is stupid."[6]

The critic Morris Dickstein has noted that while Butcher's Crossing, Stoner, and Augustus are each "strikingly different in subject," they all "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."[7] Dickstein called 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."

In his introduction to Stoner, the 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."[6]

Likewise, Steve Almond praised 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."[8]

In a wide-ranging interview with The Paris Review in 2019, Williams's widow, Nancy Gardner, discussed his war service, working methods and alcoholism.[9]

Stoner has been translated into many languages, including Spanish, French, Italian, German, and Dutch. The acclaimed novelist Anna Gavalda translated Williams's novel into French, which has contributed to its enthusiastic reception by the French literary establishment.[10]

Novels

• Nothing But the Night (1948)
• Butcher's Crossing (1960)
• Stoner (1965)
• Augustus (1972) —shared the National Book Award[2]

Poetry

• The Broken Landscape: Poems (1949)
• The Necessary Lie (1965)

Edited Anthology

• English Renaissance Poetry: A Collection of Shorter Poems from Skelton to Jonson (1963)

Wikiquote has quotations related to: John Edward Williams

• John Williams Papers at the University of Arkansas
• Obituary. The New York Times
• "The Greatest American Novel You've Never Heard of". The New Yorker
• "John Williams and the Canon that Might Have Been". The New Yorker
• Myers, D.G. "Defeats and Victories Not Recorded in the Annals of History," Commentary Magazine. Retrieved 9 January 2015