William Stoner enters the University of Missouri at nineteen to study agriculture. A seminar on English literature changes his life, and he never returns to work on his father’s farm. Stoner becomes a teacher. He marries the wrong woman. His life is quiet, and after his death his colleagues remember him rarely.Yet with truthfulness, compassion and intense power, this novel uncovers a story of universal value — of the conflicts, defeats and victories of the human race that pass unrecorded by history — and in doing so reclaims the significance of an individual life.