Why John Williams was overlooked - and rediscovered

Those who've read John Williams's great novel from ca 1970, Stoner (which has been re-printed twice, most recently by NYRB, which apparently is reprinting the complete line of Williams novels) will want to read Leo Robson's essay on Williams in the current New Yorker. Who is Robson? I have no idea. But his thesis in this piece is that Williams was a devotee of the doctrinaire literary critic from Stanford (was he from England by birth? I think so) Yvor Winters, who was antithetical to any form of experimental or cutting-edge fiction, in particular of literature in "loose" form or that uses any form of stream of consciousness - in particular Joyce, Faulkner, Whitman. He recognized only literature in a strictly detached and realistic mode, never entering the mind of the characters but presenting their world through heightened detail - which led him to like the work, essentially, of her wife, his friends, and Flaubert. Nothing wrong with Flaubert, obviously - but what a constricted way to view the world and in particular the possibilities of literature! The question before Robson and all of us is why did JW's work, esp his masterpiece, Stoner, go absolutely no where and is now recognized as one of the great novels of its time, or any time? The literary world tried and failed to make amends in 1973 by splitting the National Book Award for fiction between another Williams novel (Augustus) and one of Barth's postmodern works. Not that Barth's reputation today is anywhere near where it was in the 1970s, but looking back it's easy to see why Stoner, and JW's career, foundered. First of all, sad to say, JW was a writer "far behind his rightful time" - Stone feels like a novel not from 1970 from 1950 at the latest. By 1970 the world - and the world of the arts - was in turmoil, rejecting old verities and seeking new forms - not just the postmodern of Barth, Coover, Barthelme, Gass, but even in more conventional fiction, breaking grounds re depiction of sex, political, and personal anguish. Robson notes that the same press (Viking?) published at the same time both Bellow's Herzog and JW's Stoner. Herzog was the top best seller plus an award-winner and Stoner sold 2k copies and died. Sure, because it was way out of synch with what and how people were reading at that time plus it was in no way entertaining, witty, tumultuous, even engaging - not in the way that works of Bellow, Roth, Updike, et al. were. But who re-reads Bellow today? And Stoner's reputation has only increased over the years. As Robson correctly notes, were are today in a world of autofiction, and he should have added of multiculturalism and internationalism. Stoner fits none of these modes - but that's not why it's today recognized as a great novel. It's great because of its creation of a character who on some level is an everyman (at least everyone likely to read Stoner will identify with this liver of literature and frustrated academic) whose anguish and suffering are made palpable, whom we care about despite his faults and failings - a novel that is the story of a life, tragic in many ways (we see that hand of Flaubert here, much more than the doctrine of Yvor Winters), clear, and accessible. Williams's reputation has also been hurt by his small output (4 books) and his variety of style: Had he written 4 novels, each about an academic or literary sort, he would have provided a hook for readers (e.g., Roth and Jews, Updike and WASPS) - but as his work stands, it's hard to discern a Williams style, despite Robson's pleading.