U.S.A.
by John Dos Passos | 
I Married a Communist
by Philip Roth | 
Ship of Fools
by Katherine Anne Porter | 
The Big Money
by John Dos Passos | 
The Counterlife
by Philip Roth | 
The 42nd Parallel
by John Dos Passos | 
Herzog
by Saul Bellow | 
Reflections in a Golden Eye
by Carson McCullers | 
You Can't Go Home Again
by Thomas Wolfe | 
Rabbit, Run
by John Updike | 
The Recognitions
by William Gaddis | 
Appointment in Samarra
by John O'Hara | 
The Ghost Writer
by Philip Roth | 
Man in the Dark
by Paul Auster | 
Seize the Day
by Saul Bellow | 
East of Eden
by John Steinbeck | 
Nine Stories
by J. D. Salinger | 
David Copperfield
by Charles Dickens | 
Mrs. Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf | 
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
by Carson McCullers |
William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar'??s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a '??proper'? family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude. John Williams'??s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.