You CAN Tell a Book by its Cover! 
 Seldom has a book had a more perfect cover. It is dark, serious, and intense, yes, but then so is John Williams' 1965 novel of university life. Look more closely at the figure on the cover and you will see a man approaching middle age, a man of great sensitivity, upright but private, lost in his own thoughts; appropriately, this is a Thomas Eakins portrait entitled "The Thinker." In 1910, William Stoner sets out to walk the fifteen miles from his parents' farm to Columbia, Missouri, to study agriculture, boarding with a relative and doing farm work to pay his way. In the middle of his second year, an acerbic English professor challenges him with literature, and he secretly changes his major, staying at the university during the war years to complete his doctorate, and teaching there for the rest of his life. The book opens with reference to his death in 1956, still only an assistant professor, half deaf, and with a reputation as a campus curmudgeon. A failure, then? Not a bit of it! As the book explores five decades of Stoner's life, the man we meet is a person of passion, someone with a great potential for love, but too much principle to give in to the enmity of others. 
 It may be the best novel of university life I have ever read. But Williams makes little allowance for non-academic audiences. One crucial scene in the middle shows the oral examination for a PhD candidate in English. For those of us who have been there (on either side of the table), it is perfect, but it does require some familiarity with literary history, campus politics, and the styles of academic bombast. The exam is the turning-point in the relationship between Stoner and Hollis Lomax, his department chair and implacable enemy. Lomax is a superb portrait: physically deformed, academically brilliant, and motivated by an inexplicable hatred buried deep in the psyche. But Stoner is not to be defined by university politics, but by his commitment to his subject, his increasing abilities as a teacher, and above all by his value as a human being. 
 It is here that John Williams connects most strongly with the lay reader. Vicariously, we join in his intense friendship with two student colleagues, we feel his attraction to the beautiful banker's daughter from St. Louis with whom he falls in love, we despair at the failure of the marriage, yet share in Stoner's intense love for his growing daughter. Edith, Stoner's wife, is another of Williams' most brilliant portraits. As with Hollis Lomax, there is no easy explanation for her irrational behavior, but we sense its truth nonetheless. And when Stoner, in his forties, falls in love with a graduate student, we rejoice to see his intellectual respect and innate sensuality finally entwine and blossom. Later still, at sixty, he thinks that "he ought to be beyond the force of such passion, of such love... 
 But he was not beyond it, he knew, and would never be. [...] He had, in odd ways, given it to every moment of his life, and had perhaps given it most fully when he was unaware of his giving. It was a passion neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance. To a woman or a poem, it said simply: Look! I am alive.