Is Stoner (1965) CHUD or WOKE?
chudrank score: 56 / 100 (slightly WOKE-leaning). 0 is CHUD (right-wing), 100 is WOKE (left-wing).
Book by John Williams, 1965.
10 votes: 60% WOKE, 40% CHUD.
Why: Literary novel on quiet dignity; mild
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. …