How long does it take to read Stoner?
Stoner by John Williams takes about 5 hours 22 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 5 hours 22 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1965. 293 pages, about 80,575 words.
11 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 8 hours 57 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 5 hours 22 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 21 minutes |
The page count is the median across 49 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude. John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.
Subjects: domestic fiction, psychological fiction, Fiction, Study and teaching, College teachers, Adultery
