John Williams: Collected Novels (LOA #349): Butcher's Crossing / Stoner / Augustus

"As the spirit of experimentation swirled around him in the 1960s and '70s, John Williams, working in relative obscurity as an English professor, wrote finely crafted novels distinguished by precise form, powerful but restrained prose, and close attention to physical detail and its symbolic import. His three major works--Butcher's Crossing (1960), Stoner (1965), and the National Book Award-winning Augustus (1972)--have come to be recognized as masterpieces of American fiction. This authoritative Library of America volume brings all three together for the first time, along with editor Daniel Mendelsohn's selection of essays in which Williams reflects on the context of his work"--
For the first time, a collected edition of the major works of John Williams, including the acclaimed novel Stoner.John Williams’s three major works have come to be recognized as modern American classics and are collected in this Library of America volume for the first time. In Butcher’s Crossing, he unsettles the conventions of the Western novel to tell the haunting story of a buffalo hunting expedition that exposes the savagery and greed behind the myth of the frontier. In Stoner, he portrays power politics in academe and the quiet heroism of a midwestern English professor dedicated to the honest and dogged pursuit of his craft. In Augustus, set in ancient Rome, Williams again takes on the subject of power—more particularly, in the author’s own words, “the ambivalence between the public necessity and the private want or need.” Rounding out the volume are three essays by Williams on writing fiction and his speech upon accepting the National Book Award for Augustus in 1973.