John Edward Williams (1922–1994)

John Edward Williams, now considered a major twentieth-century American novelist but unheralded while living, spent the last several years of his life in Fayetteville (Washington County). Williams’s reputation stands primarily on his three major novels: Butcher’s Crossing (1960), Stoner (1965), and Augustus (1972); Augustus shared the National Book Award in 1973, the first instance of the award being split. But it was the 2006 republication of Stoner, which had originally sold only around 2,000 copies in 1965, by the New York Review of Books (NYRB) Classics series that made William famous.

John Edward Williams was born on August 29, 1922, in Clarksville, Texas, and raised in Wichita Falls, Texas, an oil-boom town where his father, John Edward Jewell, tried and failed to find his fortune. Family lore claimed that Jewell was shot dead by a hitchhiker who robbed him of cash made in a land transaction, but Williams’s biographer, Charles J. Shields, says there is no record of Jewell being murdered. There is, however, Shields reports, a mention of a J. E. Jewell of Wichita Falls receiving a license to marry a Mrs. L. L. Moreland in 1924.

After Jewell apparently abandoned young John Edward and his mother, Amelia Walker, she identified herself as a widow and subsequently met and married a hard-drinking manual laborer, George Clinton Williams (whose name his stepson took). Initially, the family moved around, sometimes one step ahead of the rent collector. Eventually, George Williams landed a steady job as a post office janitor.

Although of modest means, Amelia indulged her son’s love of reading by providing him with adventure magazines, and young Williams developed a particular passion for the works of Zane Grey. He found a job in a bookstore while in junior high school and “became a local curiosity because of how many books he checked out of the library,” according to his Colorado Encyclopedia biography.

The praise of an eighth-grade teacher for his writing proved a pivotal point in Williams’s life. “It was one of the first compliments I’d ever received about anything I’d done,” he said in an interview later in life.

Williams failed English at a Wichita Falls junior college, saying later that he had already read all the books they were studying. He worked as a radio announcer and married for the first time at nineteen. In 1942 during World War II, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps and served as a radio dispatcher for flights over the Himalayas. Williams claimed he was shot down over a jungle (and survived on roasted monkey meat before being rescued), but no record of the events exists.

After the war, Williams used the GI Bill to help pay for an undergraduate degree from the University of Denver (DU) in 1949. He also earned an MA at DU in 1950 and a PhD from the University of Missouri in 1954, after which he moved back to the University of Denver to teach and eventually take over the creative writing program. It was at DU that he began publishing the novels for which he is known. In 1965, Williams founded the Denver Quarterly, which describes itself as the “oldest continuously published literary arts journal west of the Mississippi.”

Williams, a heavy drinker and smoker, retired from the University of Denver in 1985 in failing health, at the time pulling along an oxygen tank from which he took breaths between puffs on a cigarette. After retirement, he was invited to give a series of lectures at the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville by the poet Miller Williams, who taught at UA for three decades.

Williams and his fourth wife Nancy Gardner Williams, whom he married in 1959, liked Fayetteville and its lower altitude and decided to stay. The couple rented a house in 1985 made available by John Clellon Holmes—poet, novelist, and instructor at the UA creative writing program—who moved back to his home state Connecticut about a year before he died. His wife in particular was fond of Fayetteville, which she said had “a beauty and character of its own, not grand but pretty and nice.” In 2000, Nancy Williams, who held a PhD in English from DU, edited the 2000 book Arkansas Biography: A Collection of Notable Lives, published by the University of Arkansas Press.

In January 1994, Williams, who had been having trouble breathing, fell and began home hospice care. Nancy would call his friends, including Miller Williams, and ask that they bring over beer and sandwiches. “They sat by his bed talking sports,” Shields wrote.

Williams died on March 3, 1994, of emphysema. Williams was survived by his wife, three children, four step-children, six grandchildren, and a sister. Nancy Williams died in 2022 in Pueblo, Colorado.

While all of Williams’s books—including his first, 1948’s Nothing But the Night (which did poorly and he later disowned)—were reissued by the University of Arkansas Press in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he did not achieve real recognition until the NYRB Classics reprint in 2006. “John Williams’s Stoner is something rarer than a great novel—it is a perfect novel, so well told and beautifully written, so deeply moving, that it takes your breath away,” wrote the literary historian Morris Dickstein in a 2007 New York Times reassessment of Williams’s opus. Stoner became a bestseller in Europe after a 2011 translation into French by Anna Gavalda, a popular novelist in France, which sparked the book’s translations into other languages.

For additional information:
Almond, Steve. “The Fall and Rise of William Stoner.” LitHub, August 29, 2019. https://lithub.com/the-fall-and-rise-of-william-stoner/ (accessed June 26, 2024).

Dickstein, Morris. “The Inner Lives of Men.” New York Times, June 17, 2007. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/17/books/review/Dickstein-t.html (accessed June 26, 2024).

“John Williams.” Colorado Encyclopedia. https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/john-williams (accessed June 26, 2024).

Reimann, Patricia. “Mrs. Stoner Speaks: An Interview with Nancy Gardner Williams.” Paris Review, February 20, 2019. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/02/20/mrs-stoner-speaks-an-interview-with-nancy-gardner-williams/ (accessed June 26, 2024).

Saxon, Wolfgang. “John Williams, 71, a Novelist, Editor and Professor of English.” New York Times, March 5, 1994. https://www.nytimes.com/1994/03/05/obituaries/john-williams-71-a-novelist-editor-and-professor-of-english.html (accessed June 26, 2024).

Shields, Charles J. The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel: John Williams, Stoner, and the Writing Life. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018.

Jeff Waggoner
Nassau, New York