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At this point my former professor’s eyes welled up with tears, and he could say nothing more. He tries again and then falls into silence.

Shakespeare speaks to you across three hundred years, Mr. Professor Sloan calls on several students, but gets no answer. One day, while discussing Shakespeare’s sonnet 73, “That Time of Year Thou Mayest in Me Behold,” the professor asks the class what the sonnet means. In his sophomore year, he is required to take a semester survey of English literature. Only by the chance suggestion of a county agent does he find himself in a pinched existence majoring in agricultural science at the university. The protagonist, William Stoner, has grown up at the turn of the twentieth century on a hardscrabble Missouri farm. I hadn’t, so he began laying out the story. The second time we met over dinner he asked if I had read Williams’s novel Stoner. I remembered him as an incisive and demanding literary critic. In 1998 I looked up the man under whom I had studied romantic poetry a quarter-century earlier. I read John Williams’s novel Stoner (1965) thirty-three years after it was published, having come to it in a singular way-through the tears of a rigorous literary critic.