John Edward Williams
| John Williams | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
August 29, 1922 Clarksville, Texas, US |
| Died | March 3, 1994 (aged 71) Fayetteville, Arkansas |
| Occupation | Author, editor, professor |
| Genre | Novel |
| Notable works | Stoner, Augustus |
| Notable awards |
National Book Award 1973 Augustus |
John Edward Williams (August 29, 1922 – March 3, 1994) was an American author, editor and professor. He was best known for his novels Stoner (1965) and Augustus (1972). The latter won a U.S. National Book Award.
Williams was raised in northeast Texas. His grandparents were farmers; his stepfather was a janitor in a post office. Despite a talent for writing and acting, Williams flunked out of a local junior college after his first year. He worked with newspapers and radio stations in the Southwest for a year, then reluctantly joined the war effort by enlisting in the United States Army Air Force early in 1942, spending two and a half years as a sergeant in India and Burma. During his enlistment, he wrote a draft of his first novel, which was published in 1948.
At the end of the war Williams moved to Denver, Colorado and enrolled in the University of Denver, receiving Bachelor of Arts (1949) and Master of Arts (1950) degrees. During his time at the University of Denver, his first two books were published, Nothing But the Night (1948), a novel depicting the terror and waywardness resulting from an early traumatic experience, and The Broken Landscape (1949), a collection of poetry. Upon completing his MA, Williams enrolled at the University of Missouri, teaching and working on his Ph.D. in English Literature, which he obtained in 1954. In the fall of 1955 Williams returned to the University of Denver as Assistant Professor, becoming director of the creative writing program. His second novel, Butcher's Crossing (Macmillan, 1960) depicts frontier life in 1870's Kansas. He edited and wrote the introduction for the anthology English Renaissance Poetry: A Collection of Shorter Poems from Skelton to Jonson (Doubleday) in 1963. His second book of poems, The Necessary Lie (1965), was issued by Verb Publications. He was the founding editor of the University of Denver Quarterly (later Denver Quarterly), which was first issued in 1965. He remained as editor until 1970.
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