William Stoner must join Ishmael, Huckleberry Finn, Jay Gatsby and Invisible Man as among the greatest of American literary creations. His book, Stoner, is certainly a great American novel. That it is not taught alongside its rightful peers in the English language curriculum of our schools is a farce.

This is a powerful book. Beneath its plain, undecorated prose lies a brutal and stirring portrait of man punished by the relentless current of time and place, subject not only to the indifferent cruelty of existence but also to the unforced errors of his own life decisions. Along the way Stoner suffers and glories with his profession, his love life, his interpersonal relationships. Every emotion is there. Through it all he manages a quiet and stolid negotiation of what befalls him. Stoner develops this character trait of stoical acceptance of both joy and misery after his mother's funeral. It's a passage I'll take with me wherever I go:

He buried her beside her husband. After the services were over and the few mourners had gone, he stood alone in a cold November wind and looked at the two graves, one open to its burden and the other mounded and covered by a thin fuzz of grass. He turned on the bare, treeless little plot that held others like his mother and father and looked across the flat land in the direction of the farm where he had been born, where his mother and father had spent their years. He thought of the cost extracted, year after year, by the soil; and it remained as it had been - a little more barren, perhaps, a little more frugal of increase. Nothing had changed. Their lives had been expended in cheerless labor, their wills broken, their intelligences numbed. Now they were in the earth to which they had given their lives; and slowly, year by year, the earth would take them. Slowly the damp and rot would infest the pine boxes which held their bodies, and slowly it would touch their flesh, and finally it would consume the last vestiges of their substances. And they would become a meaningless part of that stubborn earth to which they had long ago given themselves.

I really can't say enough good things about this book within the short space of this subreddit post. You really just need to read the book. It'll be worth your time. Maybe we can discuss it further in the comments below. Highly recommended.