If the Coen brothers made a film about the chain-smoking, booze-sodden, mistress-hopping subculture of post-World War II American novelists, John Williams could serve as the protagonist. Previously a biographer of Harper Lee and Kurt Vonnegut, Charles J. Shields traces Williams from the poverty he left behind through the war and the early years of university creative writing programs and conferences. In Williams’ mind, a garret in Paris was better than a classroom in Denver, but he got stuck in academia, enticed by a dependable paycheck. He constructed an identity based on Romantic notions of the artist, yet developed a diamond-hard theory of writing that privileged intellect over emotion. He never wrote the Great American Novel and was forgotten until, a few years ago, Europeans turned Stoner (1965), his novel about an unhappy college professor, into a posthumous bestseller. Shields’ writing is captivating and reveals much about the wounded psyches of the GI Bill generation of American (male) authors.
