Stoner
This is the story of a quiet man, destined to be a farmer, but who becomes an academic. It is a book in which nothing and everything happens, and it is possibly the greatest novel you've ever read.
'It's simply a novel about a guy who goes to college and becomes a teacher. But it's one of the most fascinating things that you've ever come across, Tom Hanks, Time
William Stoner enters the University of Missouri at nineteen to study agriculture. A seminar on English literature changes his life, and he never returns to work on his father's farm. Stoner becomes a teacher. He marries the wrong woman. His life was quiet, and after his death, his colleagues rarely remembered him.
Yet with truthfulness, compassion, and intense power, this novel uncovers a story of universal value - of the conflicts, defeats, and victories of the human race that pass unrecorded by history - and in doing so reclaims the significance of an individual life.