Relatively little known during his lifetime, John Williams (1922-1994) has enjoyed an enormous renaissance as a novelist in the twenty-first century. Read Williams’s three major novels, each a landmark in its genre. Stoner (1965), a quintessential campus novel that brought Williams back into the public eye, offers a poignant, revelatory portrait of an ordinary professor’s quiet struggles and redemptive inner life amid academic pettiness. Butcher’s Crossing (1960), a gripping revisionary Western, follows a Harvard-educated young man’s harrowing buffalo hunt across the unforgiving prairie, exposing the brutal illusions of frontier romance. Augustus (1972), an ambitious epistolary novel, chronicles the life of Rome’s first emperor through fragmented letters and documents, revealing power’s complex human cost. Writing in three strikingly different genres — campus novel, Western, and historical novel — Williams had great success in making them very much his own.
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