Recommendations from our site
“A lot of people think, ‘This is a novel about drugs.’ It is not at all! It is about a young man, William Stoner, who goes off to university at great financial cost and deprivation to his father, who is a pioneer farmer. The boy goes off to agricultural college and this is seen as a great triumph. But while he is there he encounters literature for the first time, specifically a Shakespearian sonnet, and is transformed by reading it. He decides he doesn’t want to study agriculture at all, and we see him become a professor of literature…It is a story of intellectual determination and the ability of a man to find love simply in what he does. It is a book about love of learning…To me, Stoner is almost the perfect novel. It is very little known but anyone who reads it is completely captivated by it.” Read more...
Simon Winchester, Journalist
