In 1973, the judges of the National Book Award for fiction, finding themselves deadlocked, resolved to split the prize. Media coverage presented the verdict as reflective of a broader schism in American writing between the experimental and the traditional. John Barth, awarded for “Chimera”—a trilogy of novellas that zanily recast ancient narratives—was the leading exponent of postmodern fiction. Two of his allies in this cause, Leslie Fiedler—the first critic to use the word “postmodernism” in a literary connection—and William Gass, had served on that year’s jury. By contrast, John Williams, the other winner, was an academic literary scholar—a professor at the University of Denver and the editor of an anthology of Renaissance poems—with a slender, little-noticed literary output. His winning novel, “Augustus,” a carefully crafted account of the Roman emperor, revealed a writer at odds with the prevailing fashions. But what, exactly, did he represent?

Though Williams would not have balked at the “traditionalist” tag—he considered the Barth-Gass movement a “dead end”—the tradition he belonged to was closer to a cult. Some two decades earlier, Williams had been converted to a theory of literature originating in the work of the Stanford-based poet and polemicist Yvor Winters. Like numerous adherents before and after—the American poet-critics J. V. Cunningham and R. P. Blackmur, the English poet-critics Thom Gunn and Donald Davie, and the future U.S. Poet Laureates Robert Hass, Robert Pinsky, Philip Levine, and Donald Hall—Williams had been spellbound by Winters’s authoritative tone and by a set of absolutist convictions relating not just to Anglophone poetry but to literature as a whole. Modish, persona-heavy metafiction or fealty to a more austere and straight-backed standard: this was not a difference that could be split.

For almost twenty years after his death, in 1994, Williams appeared doomed to near-oblivion—omitted from every list, popular or scholarly, canonical or hipster-revisionist. If he had any sort of afterlife, it was as a writer’s writer or a secondhand bookseller’s writer. What eventually propelled him to posthumous fame was the rediscovery of his 1965 book “Stoner,” a small-scale, modestly written campus novel that follows a mid-ranking academic from cradle to deathbed. There was, at first, little excitement when, in the summer of 2006, New York Review Books Classics reissued the book, after lobbying from a Manhattan book dealer. But, later that year, Anna Gavalda, a popular French novelist, read a piece in the Guardian in which the writer Colum McCann called it “one of the great forgotten novels of the past century.” Gavalda read the book and asked her publisher to secure translation rights, a decision that caught the attention of publishers around Europe. Starting in 2011, “Stoner” became a best-seller in France, the Netherlands, Italy, Israel, and the U.K. It was praised as “beautiful” and even “perfect” by a number of prominent writers, including Bret Easton Ellis and Ian McEwan, and was described by the London Sunday Times as “The Greatest Novel You Have Never Read.” At the end of 2013, Waterstones, the British bookshop chain, awarded its Book of the Year accolade to a novel that had been rejected by Williams’s British publisher, Victor Gollancz, and had first appeared in the U.K. eight years after its U.S. début, on the coattails of “Augustus.”

One result of Williams’s belated best-sellerdom is that he is now attracting the sort of specialist attention he was denied throughout his career. Mark Asquith, in the shrewd study “Reading the Novels of John Williams” (Lexington), and Charles J. Shields, in his engrossing short biography “The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel” (Texas), have raided Williams’s papers at the University of Arkansas, where he lectured after retiring. A clearer picture is now emerging of a novelist committed to forging an eccentric course.

Williams was born in 1922, in Clarksville, Texas. As a teen-ager, he borrowed so many books from his high-school library that he was featured in a local newspaper. In 1942, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps. When he returned to the U.S., three years later, he had produced some pages of a novel, written during his off-hours, in a tent in Calcutta. The pages became “Nothing but the Night,” published in 1948 by the Denver-based Swallow Press, and now reissued by NYRB Classics, completing its set of Williams titles.

The novel concerns a day in the life of Arthur Maxley, an angsty layabout in an unnamed city who wastes his hours agonizing about whether to take a trip to the local park, having lunch with a friend—a homosexual who embarrasses him—and striving to dodge a traumatic memory that has been triggered by news of his father’s return from a business trip. Williams later took every opportunity to dismiss his first novel, and you can see why: it is slackly written and deficient in narrative technique. In his only published essay about another novelist, which appeared in 1968, Williams objected to Henry Miller’s “almost mechanic alternation” of narrative and reverie. Toward the end of “Nothing but the Night,” Arthur experiences a long, painful flashback. When the girl he’s with asks him what’s wrong, he replies, “Nothing’s wrong. . . . I just remembered something for a minute.”

But Williams didn’t disown the novel simply as a piece of juvenilia. He came to see it as a violation of everything he thought a novel should be. This had much to do with the way his principles and priorities shifted after the publisher and academic Alan Swallow, accepting Williams’s manuscript, prevailed on him to enroll as a G.I. Bill student at the University of Denver, where Swallow taught in the English department. Swallow was an ardent disciple of Yvor Winters—he had dubbed him “the sage of Palo Alto” and published his books through Swallow Press—and he soon recruited Williams to the cause. Winters thought that the high point of literary expression had come and gone during the Renaissance, when “the tougher poets” like Fulke Greville wrote with a sense of rational order in the “plain style.” In the early eighteenth century, a decisive break had occurred—the start of what Winters branded Romanticism, defined as the misbegotten idea that “literature is mainly or even purely an emotional experience.” In the fullest statement of Winters’s views, “In Defense of Reason” (1947), a compendium of his earlier critical books, he railed against what he called “the fallacy of imitative form”—the tendency to express disintegration or uncertainty through language that itself exhibits those qualities. The “sound” alternative, Winters wrote, was to make a lucid statement “regarding the condition of uncertainty.” The “conscious author” and the pursuit of “formal perfection” emerged as desirable alternatives to “the fragmentary and unguided thought of the character, as he walks down the street, or sits in a bar, or dreams at night.”

The imitative fallacy was, in Winters’s view, close to being a national literary vice. In his studies of “American obscurantism,” collected in “Maule’s Curse” (1938), he outlined a choice between striving for lucidity and embracing wildness. The argument anticipated a still famous intervention made by Philip Rahv in the Kenyon Review the following year. Rahv identified “two polar types” corresponding to a “split personality” in American literature: the “paleface” and the “redskin.” (Today the terminology grates, like certain football mascots.) In his scheme, the paleface views life as a discipline and his country as a source of “endless ambiguities,” while the redskin views life as an “opportunity” and revels in “Americanism.” Many of the writers Winters most admired wound up in Rahv’s paleface pantheon—Hawthorne, Melville, Emily Dickinson, Henry James. (Winters also expressed a strong taste for the work of Edith Wharton.)