A novel is about the opening of consciousness, in both the characters who inhabit the fictional narrative and the reader envisioning the novel in their head as they explore the terrain the author has laid out. Some novels are more obvious about revealing themselves than others – crudely over-explanatory and making sure the reader gets everything – and other novels move in the opposite direction, showing themselves in more indirect ways. Very few writers successfully find the magical balance, a fusion of plain-spoken simplicity that becomes the complexly lyrical. The American writer John Williams (1922–94) achieved this, most notably in Stoner (1965). The tale of the rediscovery of Stoner 40 years after it was published is one of those heartening stories that give writers hope. Published to good reviews but no sales, Stoner, like most novels, kind of disappeared. But it had a small group of fans, and since its reprint a few years ago it has sold hundreds of thousands of copies in 21 countries – largely by word of mouth. The success of Stoner has led to the republication of Williams’s only other two novels (he disowned his debut): Butcher’s Crossing (1960) and Augustus (1972).

I remembered hearing about Stoner and thinking that everyone recommending it to me must think I’d like it because the title made it seem like it was about drugs – and I shrugged it off. But it kept being recommended to me and finally I bought it. I found out that Stoner was about William Stoner, a farm boy who enters the University of Missouri in 1910 and becomes a teacher there until his death in 1956. The book simply, powerfully, catalogues the disappointments that make up a life, which makes it sound depressing, but it isn’t, because we identify with Stoner, and his failures are our failures. It is clear-eyed in its compassion and, though you may be weeping at the end, it’s a very consoling book, because it says we aren’t alone in our suffering – everyone suffers. But it is Stoner’s stoicism in the face of sadness and loss that makes the book such an unusual novel. The drama stems from the fact that he deals with the things that happen to him with quiet acceptance. This reticence is what makes the novel gripping because it is so unlike other novels, which require their main characters to be active participants in the narrative drama swirling around them.

Butcher’s Crossing, published five years before Stoner, is a more conventionally dramatic novel, though its main male character shares similarities with Stoner – that stoicism in the face of futility, loss of innocence, looming death, annihilation.

The year is 1873 and Butcher’s Crossing is a town in Kansas – a settlement, really, an idea that hasn’t happened yet – where William Andrews, a man in his early 20s who has just dropped out of Harvard, has come west from Boston vaguely looking for a sense of adventure. William is a dreamy man, remembering the lectures Emerson gave and saying things such as “I just want to know more about this country” when asked why he has found himself at Butcher’s Crossing.

An introduction from a friend of his father, a Unitarian minister, leads him to a man named Miller. Something stirs in William when Miller tells him about a time he was trapping beaver in Colorado and stumbled upon a massive herd of buffalo in a valley that Miller assumed no man had ever seen before. William proposes putting up the money for a hunting expedition – horses, a wagon, provisions. Again, the reasons are vague, inchoate: “… he realised that the hunt that he had arranged with Miller was only a stratagem, a ruse for himself, a palliative for ingrained custom and use. No business led him where he looked, where he would go; he went there free.” Miller promises to lead them to a valley in the Rocky Mountains where those thousands of buffalo graze, and William, intrigued, lured by the pull of nature – all that Emerson he absorbed at Harvard – gives Miller half of an inheritance to be part of this “adventure”.

And so the small cast of characters is assembled and given roles: Miller as the hunter who will shoot the buffalo; practical-minded Fred Schneider who will do the skinning; and Miller’s assistant Charley Hoge, a half-crazed alcoholic who carries a cheap Bible stained with buffalo blood and who lost one of his hands on the last hunt he went on with Miller (two images that foreshadow the horrors to come) will cook and keep camp. William will be the witness.

There is the one woman in this world: a prostitute named Francine who becomes extremely attracted to William. He is attracted to her as well but he’s conflicted because she’s a whore, even though she seems totally fine about the life she has made for herself in Butcher’s Crossing. “It must be a terrible life for you,” William murmurs as she quietly comes on to him one evening before the men head out of town for the hunt. But there is no love story. It is Miller’s narrative the men are entering – he is Ahab – and an already revisionist western becomes an increasingly unromantic and harrowing book about the futility of trying to control nature.

Butcher’s Crossing is resolutely a western. However, when his publisher expressed a desire to state as much on the cover due to the popularity of the genre at the time, Williams said no. It may be one of the more literary westerns I’ve read, but it is a western – and a precursor to what Cormac McCarthy would do with the genre, especially in his blood-soaked and hallucinatory Blood Meridian, or what Robert Altman achieved in his frontier masterpiece McCabe & Mrs Miller. Butcher’s Crossing dismantles the myth of the west, revealing a horror story about the grinding day to day of just surviving, which is very much what Stoner is about as well. But Butcher’s Crossing isn’t Stoner. It moves along by incident and increasingly dramatic action set-pieces. Its narrative is quickly dominated by the calm, inexorable madness of Miller, and we fear for the men who become trapped by that madness. Stoner is about stoicism as a way of life, where Butcher’s Crossing is more conventional and straightforward, though it contains the same restrained and gorgeous lyricism. Beautiful things happen that you never would have imagined: the thirsty horses smell water and dangerously gallop towards it, dragging the wagon and their respective riders in an out-of‑control and deadly race toward a stream. There is a terrifying blizzard that has been foreshadowed in the opening scenes and where a single flake of snow suddenly causes the men to panic, except for William who doesn’t at first understand the danger that snowflake portends – he is initially delighted by it; and a terrible accident occurs as the men try to cross a river. The fearsome title of Butcher’s Crossing promises something more menacing and savage than anything in Stoner, and it leads us into the novel’s greatest set-piece: the slaughter of the buffalo at Miller’s hand.

William’s ultimate disgust with the hunt has a little to do with his sympathy for the murdered buffalo, but it also becomes about his youthful narcissism and mirrors his condescending treatment of Francine – how he had fled from her when she had attempted to seduce him: “… it came to him that he had sickened and turned away because of his shock at seeing the buffalo a few moments before proud and noble and full of the dignity of life, now stark and helpless, a length of inert meat, divested of itself, or his notion of its self, swinging grotesquely, mockingly, before him. It was not itself; or it was not that self that he had imagined it to be. That self was murdered; and in that murder he had felt the destruction of something within him, and he had not been able to face it. So he had turned away.”

That is the closest Butcher’s Crossing comes to being sentimental, but even in its softer moments it doesn’t overdo anything, and the moral criticism is in the precision of the language, the now-famous simple and elegant Williams prose. Both books are resolutely mid-century American: there is nothing modernist going on here and very little that is ornamental.

And you can’t read Williams through the veil of political correctness, with some of his critics accusing him of misogyny because the only female character in Butcher’s Crossing is the prostitute. But it is William who has the problem with Francine, not Francine or the book she’s a part of. It is Will’s failure that he is unable to process the lust he feels for her, and his fear is tied up with a morality that has no place in the wilds of Butcher’s Crossing.

It is easy perhaps to be over-sympathetic to the “plight” of Williams, to think of him as a failure because he never sold any books in his lifetime. But compared with most writers he had a pretty good ride: he published his first novel at 25; he got a PhD from the University of Missouri; he became the director of the creative writing programme at the University of Denver; he became the first editor and publisher of the Denver Quarterly Review; he married three times; he had three children; he won a National book award; he lived to 71; he drank a lot. And he produced a masterpiece that is being discovered by an army of readers today, along with two very good novels that are now in print. For a man who came from a broke farming family in the windblown “Dust Bowl” of the 1930s, Williams, in his own quiet way, becomes as heroic as his most famous fictional character.

• Butcher’s Crossing is reissued this week by Vintage Classics.