Fifteen years ago, a friend of mine pulled me aside at the tail end of some sodden grad-school party and pressed a copy of the novel “Stoner” into my hands. I was at the time in the thrall of various junkie authors and thus assumed “Stoner” would be a tale of psychoactive depravity. The book was a different sort of trip altogether.

The novel follows the life of an academic named William Stoner, a man forgotten by his students and colleagues, by history itself. The author, the late John Williams, announces all this on Page 1. It’s as if he’s daring us to dismiss the book. I devoured it in one sitting. I had never encountered a work so ruthless in its devotion to human truths and so tender in its execution.

I realize this is the kind of thing besotted readers say all the time about their favorite books, so let me offer into evidence this brief passage about an affair Stoner initiates as a refuge from his joyless marriage:

“In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.”

I sort of rest my case.

Since its publication in 1965, “Stoner” has gone out of print twice, doomed by its mundane plot and restrained style. But a funny thing happened on the way to the remainders table. Thanks to a legion of disciples, many of them prominent writers (along with Tom Hanks, who recommended the book in a Time interview), “Stoner” became the Little Novel That Could. Despite selling only 2,000 copies in its initial printing, “Stoner” topped best-seller lists all across Europe last year, and has steadily infiltrated literary discussions about the American canon. One critic actually got so sick of the praise heaped upon the novel that he recently published a rather self-defeating screed condemning its popularity.