John Williams

Born in Clarksville, Texas, in 1922 and raised from age six in Denver, Williams served in the Army Air Forces in the China-Burma-India theater during the Second World War before earning a doctorate at the University of Denver, where he taught for the rest of his career and helped found one of the country's first creative-writing PhD programs.

Stoner, his deliberately anti-dramatic 1965 novel, follows an unambitious literature professor through a loveless marriage, a stalled academic career, and one brief affair, treating an entirely ordinary defeated life with the same gravity other novels reserve for triumph. It went out of print within a few years of publication; only a 2003 New York Review Books reissue, decades later, turned it into the internationally beloved word-of-mouth classic it is today.

His last novel, Augustus, reconstructed the rise of Rome's first emperor entirely through invented letters, memoranda, and journal entries, and shared the 1973 National Book Award with John Barth's Chimera. Williams died in 1994, largely unaware of the vast readership Stoner would eventually find.