John Williams attended a local junior college for a year but dropped out after failing freshman English, and then worked in media before joining the war effort in early 1942 by enlisting in the United States Army Air Force.

During his enlistment in Calcutta, he wrote pages of a novel, which later became Nothing But the Night, published in 1948 by Swallow Press and later reissued by New York Review Books Classics.

During his time at the University of Denver, his first two books were published, Nothing But the Night (1948), a novel depicting the terror and waywardness resulting from an early traumatic experience, and The Broken Landscape (1949), a collection of poetry.

[5] In 1963, Williams edited and wrote the introduction for the anthology English Renaissance Poetry: A Collection of Shorter Poems from Skelton to Jonson (Doubleday).

The publication elicited a backlash from poet and literary critic Yvor Winters who claimed that Williams's anthology overlapped with his canon and the introduction imitated his arguments.

"[8] The critic Morris Dickstein has noted that while Butcher's Crossing, Stoner, and Augustus are each "strikingly different in subject," they all "show a similar narrative arc: a young man's initiation, vicious male rivalries, subtler tensions between men and women, fathers and daughters, and finally a bleak sense of disappointment, even futility.

[10][11] In a wide-ranging interview with The Paris Review in 2019, Williams's widow, Nancy Gardner, discussed his war service, working methods and alcoholism.

[12] Stoner has been translated into many languages, including Arabic, Croatian, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Serbian and Spanish.