John Edward Williams

John Edward William (1922/08/22 - 1994/03/03) was an American writer who won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1973 with his historical fiction Augustus. He was a director of creative writing program at the University of Denver, where he taught for more than 30 years.

He published 4 novels Nothing but the Night (1948), Butcher's Crossing (1960), Stoner (1965), and Augustus (1972) and 2 books of poetry The Broken Landscapes (1949) and The Necessary Lie (1972).

The critic Morris Dickstein has noted that, while Butcher's Crossing, Stoner, and Augustus are "strikingly different in subject," they "show a similar narrative arc: a young man's initiation, vicious male rivalries, subtler tensions between men and women, fathers and daughters, and finally a bleak sense of disappointment, even futility." Dickstein called Stoner, in particular, "something rarer than a great novel -- it is a perfect novel, so well told and beautifully written, so deeply moving, it takes your breath away."