Fifty years ago this November, in a half-full gymnasium at Southwest Texas State, Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law a bill that aimed to transform American higher education. The Higher Education Act of 1965 promised to make a college education more accessible to more Americans, through federal grants, work-study jobs, and low-interest loans. The effects of the act would be significant; as Johnson put it, “To thousands of young men and women, this act means the path of knowledge is open to all that have the determination to walk it.”

That same year, a teacher from Northeast Texas published a novel about one such determined young man. Stoner, by the professor and novelist John Williams, tells the story of a man whose life was shaped by the higher education system. The book traces the life of Bill Stoner, an upwardly-mobile student who leaves his parents’ farm to matriculate at the University of Missouri, where he studies, and then teaches, for the rest of his life. “William Stoner entered the University of Missouri as a freshman in the year of 1910, at the age of nineteen,” the book begins:

Eight years later, during the height of World War I, he received his Doctor of Philosophy degree and accepted an instructorship at the same University, where he taught until his death in 1956. He did not rise above the rank of assistant professor, and few students remembered him with any sharpness after they took his courses. When he died, his colleagues made a memorial contribution of a medieval manuscript to the University library. This manuscript may still be found in the Rare Books Collection, bearing the inscription: “Presented to the Library of the University of Missouri, in memory of William Stoner, Department of English. By his colleagues.”

The opening paragraph, muted in tone, presents the book’s plot in miniature. Williams takes readers from Stoner’s birth on a farm in 1891 to his death throes on a sunny day sixty-five years later. The novel asks readers to assess the value of the life it describes. During his many decades at the university, Stoner suffers one painful setback after another: a loveless marriage, a ruthless professional rival, a thwarted love affair, and, finally, a cancerous tumor that kills him. Williams recounts each of these events in unsparing detail; his lucid prose renders acute emotional distress without ever tipping into melodrama. The book is as brutal in feeling as it is narrow in scope. It is the story of a man whose suffering, and minor successes, were lost to history.

Stoner itself met a similarly quiet fate. It sold only 2000 copies in the years after its first publication. But it wormed its way into the hearts of academics, writers, and teachers. Over the years, Irving Howe and C.P. Snow championed it in print. According to the writer Steve Almond, grad students in the 1990s passed it around like some form of delicious contraband. The novel was re-released by NYRB Classics in 2006, and it’s been on an upward trajectory ever since. Morris Dickstein sang its praises in the New York Times. In 2013 it was a bestseller across Europe. The New Yorker called it “The Greatest American Novel You’ve Never Heard Of,” while the Guardian named it one of the “must-read books” of 2013. This month, NYRB is releasing a 50th anniversary edition. It’s the perfect holiday gift for anyone who views teaching as a vocation.

For many of us who teach at the college level, though, reading Stoner on its fiftieth anniversary is an ironic experience. Stoner’s tragic life is, at once, familiar and aspirational. We recognize his love of teaching and devotion to his students. What looks increasingly unfamiliar, though, is the professional stability that Williams describes, and on which the plot of his novel depends. (Williams himself taught for thirty years at the University of Denver.) Today, very few academics ride out their careers at a single institution. This is because very few academics are tenured, or even tenure-track. More and more, universities depend upon the labor of contingent faculty—instructors employed, either full-time or part-time, on short-term contracts with no possibility of permanent employment, no matter how much they publish or how popular, or rigorous, their courses might be. This is a new kind of tragedy for teachers of college English, one that makes a return to Williams’s novel all the more necessary.