Most wanted nothing to do with the book, called Nothing but the Night, about a man who suffered an early trauma. Returning to the United States in 1945, Williams moved to Key West, where he operated a radio station and tried to sell his novel to publishers. The war’s violence traumatized Williams, who continued to have nightmares about it for decades afterward. Instead, he got malaria, worked on a novel during his downtime, and learned via letter that his wife was leaving him.
He later told a story of being shot down over Burma and losing five of his plane’s eight-person crew, but no military records support the tale. He served in Asia for the duration of World War II, working as a radio dispatcher on treacherous flights over the Himalayan Mountains between India and China.
In 1942 Williams joined the Army Air Corps. He found a job as a radio announcer and married Alyeene Bryan at age nineteen. After high school, however, he dropped out of a local junior college after failing freshman English, which he later claimed to have ignored in favor of extracurricular activities because he had already read most of the books. During junior high school, John got a job at a bookstore, developed a love of reading, and became a local curiosity because of how many books he checked out of the library. Little is known about his father he was raised by his mother and his stepfather, George Williams, in the Wichita Falls area, where Williams worked as a post office janitor.
John Williams was born on August 29, 1922, to John Edward Jewell and Amelia Walker in the northeast Texas town of Clarksville. Never a popular success during his lifetime, Williams developed a cult following in the 2010s thanks to reprints of his novels by New York Review Books (the book-publishing arm of the New York Review of Books). He is best known for his three major novels: Butcher’s Crossing (1960), a revisionist Western set partly in Colorado Territory, which helped pave the way for so-called anti-Westerns Stoner (1965), about an English professor in Missouri, which is often described as a “perfect novel” and Augustus (1972), about the start of the Roman Empire, which won the National Book Award for Fiction. John Edward Williams (1922–94) was a novelist and professor at the University of Denver, where he founded Denver Quarterly and helped build the school’s creative writing program.
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