This is a sad and beautiful book, one of only three novels written by Williams who died in 1994 at the age of 72.  Recommended by my cousin, Fran, and mentioned in By the Book by Simon Winchester as the last book that made him cry, I was mesmerized by the language, the rhythm, and the trajectory of a life that Williams created despite the absence of very much action.  The eponymous main character, William Stoner was born in 1891 and died in 1956 after spending his entire adult life at the University of Missouri, teaching, advising, and studying the role of Medieval literature on Renaissance and later English literature.  His friendships, his marriage, his daughter, his career were all a disappointing to him but, as he said repeatedly towards the end of his life, “What did you expect?” and ”it hardly mattered”.  He had wanted love, and he had found  love but relinquished it when he lost Katherine Driscoll, one of his students.  As Stoner concluded as his life unfolded in an unsatisfactory way, “He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been…..The question came from the accretion of his years, from the density of accident and circumstance, and from what he had come to understand of them.  He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge:  that in the long run all things even the learning that let him know this were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter.”  Not a very sanguine message, but one that resonates throughout this book and which led me, as it did Simon Winchester, to shed a tear for poor Willy Stoner.