Stoner sold just 2,000 copies before going out of print one year after its publication. Almost fifty years later it has become an unexpected bestseller in both Europe and the United States.

Born into a Missouri farming family, William Stoner is sent to the state university to study agronomy, only to find himself irreversibly drawn to English Literature. When asked the meaning of a Shakespeare sonnet, Stoner is unable to speak, overwhelmed. A teacher diagnoses: “You are in love, it’s as simple as that.”

He has good days but they are followed by long years of disappointments – his career as a teacher is filled with obstacles, his wife and daughter turn against him, and a new love which transforms his life ends abruptly under threat of a scandal. Awkward and shy, Stoner recedes deeper into himself until the last sound of silence is lost. He can neither articulate nor follow what has happened and it is in these quiet moments that “the hair on your arms stand up for reasons you can’t name, giving you glimpses of eternity through the darkening view out an office window on a winter night.

"The book, like professor William Stoner, isn’t out to win popularity contests. It endures, illumined from within,” says Tim Kreider in The New Yorker.

Published in 1965.