Academic Novels - including the very promosing Stoner

Started - and didn't get too far but am looking forward to continuing reading tonight - John Williams's forgotten and recently "discovered" (thank you NY Review of Books Press) 1965 novel Stoner, about an eponymous man (no, the word did not then carry any ironic or hipster connotations) who lived a decidedly not-glamorous, not-famous life as an English professor (retired as an assistant professor) at the University of Missouri in the first half of the 20th century. Academic novels often appeal to fellow-academics, many of whom are the critics and reviewers who establish literary tastes and trends, and I too have a soft spot for the genre, although not all of them are great: among the better would be Roth's When She Was Good, the novel by Malamud whose name I can't recall, Nabokov's Pnin (sort of a companion piece to Stoner, in that the eponymous academic was if I recall an Assistant Professor Emeritus), William Maxwell's short novel about U of Indiana, and some lesser contenders like The Art of Fielding, Proses's contemporary take on the Blue Angel, Smiley's Moo ... these just off the top of my head. From first sections, Stoner is really a cut above all of these, at least potentially (we'll see how it holds up - so many novels don't sad to say): he's a very poor farm boy whose family sacrifices to send him to the ag school at Missouri where he falls in love w/ literature and begins studying for a doctorate to become what they quaintly call a "teacher." Just comparing this the the Nobelist's novel I just abandoned, Palace Walk, could make a case study successful ways to present a back story, and not: Mahfouz just told us what each of the characters was like, what their characteristics were, without having them do anything or face any evident conflict, drama, or emotion; Williams in a very few pages sketches in the pathos of this young man's life, his loneliness working his way through college by doing farm chores for board, with having no friends, his uncertainty about his intelligence, the struggle to tell his nearly wordless parents that he's not coming back to the farm- an almost heart-breaking scene of sorrow and resignation - the sense not only poverty but also of poverty against privilege in the university setting, the haves and have-nots, and of course the provincialism of life in a land grant at the beginning of the 20th century - a despair that Williams must have felt in his own barely recognized writer's life at the U of Denver (I think) - hard not to think his work would have been much more celebrated had he taught at a major writing center like Iowa or at an Ivy or in NYC.