John Williams; Novelist Won National Book Award

John Williams, 71, an acclaimed novelist and poet who won the National Book Award in 1973. His novel “Augustus,” a tale of the Roman golden age, won the National Book Award. Other works include “Nothing but the Night,” published in 1948; “Stoner” in 1965, and “Butcher’s Crossing” in 1960. Williams also published two books of verse, “The Necessary Lie” and “The Broken Landscape,” and edited the volume “English Renaissance Poetry,” a classic text in Renaissance scholarship. He founded the Denver Quarterly magazine and taught at the University of Denver for 30 years. In Fayetteville, Ark., on Thursday of respiratory complications.