William Keepers Maxwell, Jr.

William Keepers Maxwell
William Keepers Maxwell, Jr.
Born	(1908-08-16)August 16, 1908 Lincoln, Illinois, United States
Died	New York City, New York
Occupation	Editor, novelist, short story writer
Nationality	American
Genre	Domestic realism

William Keepers Maxwell, Jr. (August 16, 1908 – July 31, 2000) was an American editor, novelist, short story writer, essayist, children's author, and memoirist. He served as a fiction editor at The New Yorker from 1936 to 1975. An editor devoted to his writers, Maxwell became a legendary mentor and confidant to many of the most prominent authors of his day. Although best known as an editor, Maxwell was a highly respected and award winning novelist and short story writer. His stature as a celebrated author has grown in the years following his death.

Early life

Maxwell was born in Lincoln, Illinois on August 16, 1908. His parents were William Keepers Maxwell and Eva Blossom Blinn Maxwell. During the 1918 flu epidemic, the 10-year-old Maxwell became ill and survived, but his mother died. After his mother's death he was sent to live with an aunt and uncle in Bloomington, Illinois. Upon his father's remarriage, young Maxwell joined him in Chicago. He attended Senn High School. After graduating from the University of Illinois, Maxwell earned a master's degree at Harvard University.

Career

Maxwell was best known for being a fiction editor of The New Yorker magazine for forty years (1936-1975), where he worked with writers such as Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, J.D. Salinger, John Cheever, Mavis Gallant, Frank O'Connor, Larry Woiwode, Maeve Brennan, John O'Hara, Eudora Welty, Shirley Hazzard, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. As an editor Welty wrote of him: "For fiction writers, he was the headquarters." He also wrote six highly acclaimed novels, a number of short stories and essays, children's stories, and a memoir, Ancestors (1972). His award-winning fiction, which is increasingly seen as some of the most important of the 20th Century, has recurring themes of childhood, family, loss and lives changed quietly and irreparably. Much of his work is autobiographical, particularly concerning the loss of his mother when he was 10 years old growing up in the rural Midwest of America. After the flu epidemic, young Maxwell had to move away from the house where he lived at the time, which he referred to as the "Wunderkammer" or "Chamber of Wonders". He wrote of his loss "It happened too suddenly, with no warning, and we none of us could believe it or bear it... the beautiful, imaginative, protected world of my childhood swept away."

Since his death in 2000 several works of biography have appeared, including A William Maxwell Portrait: Memories and Appreciations (W. W. Norton & Co., 2004), My Mentor: A Young Man's Friendship with William Maxwell by Alec Wilkinson (Houghton-Mifflin, 2002), and William Maxwell: A Literary Life by Barbara Burkhardt (University of Illinois Press, 2005). In 2008 the Library of America published the first of two collections of works by William Maxwell, Early Novels and Stories, edited by Christopher Carduff. His collected edition of William Maxwell's fiction, published to mark the writer's centenary, was completed by a second volume, Later Novels and Stories in the fall of 2008.

Personal life

William Maxwell was married to the former Emily Gilman Noyes of Portland, Oregon. Emily Maxwell was an accomplished painter, winning the Medal of Honor in 1986 from the National Association of Women Artists. She also reviewed children's books for The New Yorker. The couple were married for fifty-five years, with William's death following his wife's only eight days later. They had two daughters, Katherine and Emily. William Maxwell died on July 31, 2000 in New York City. The epitaph marking his memorial gravestone in Oregon reads, The Work is the Message.

Works

Novels

• Bright Center of Heaven (1934)
• They Came Like Swallows (1937) - autobiographical novella about the cruel impact of the 1918 flu epidemic, as seen through the eyes of an 8-year-old Midwestern child and his family
• The Folded Leaf (1945)
• Time Will Darken It (1948)
• The Chateau (1961)
• So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980) — An aging man remembers a boyhood friendship he had in 1920s Illinois, which falters following a murder.

Short-story collections

• The Old Man and the Railroad Crossing and Other Tales (1966)
• Over by the River, and Other Stories (1977)
• Five Tales (1988)
• Billie Dyer and Other Stories (1992)
• All The Days and Nights: The Collected Stories of William Maxwell (1995)

Non-fiction

• Ancestors: A Family History (memoir) (1972)
• The Outermost Dream (essay collection) (1989)

Children's books

• The Heavenly Tenants (1946) - The constellations of the zodiac come to life and visit a family farm in Wisconsin.
• Mrs. Donald's Dog Bun and His Home Away from Home (1995)

Collections

• Early Novels and Stories: Bright Center of Heaven / They Came Like Swallows / The Folded Leaf / Time Will Darken It / Stories 1938-1956 (Library of America, 2008) ISBN 978-1-59853-026-1
• Later Novels and Stories: The Château / So Long, See You Tomorrow / Stories and Improvisations 1957 - 1999 (Library of America, 2008)

Awards and honors

• 1947 Newbery Medal runner-up for The Heavenly Tenants
• 1980 William Dean Howells Medal for So Long, See You Tomorrow,
• 1982 National Book Award for So Long, See You Tomorrow
• 1984 Brandeis Creative Arts Award
• 1995 PEN/Malamud Award
• 1995 Mark Twain Award

Further reading

• Baxter, Charles, Michael Collier and Edward Hirsch (eds.). A William Maxwell Portrait: Memories and Appreciations. New York: Norton, 2004. ISBN 978-0-393-05771-3
• Burkhardt, Barbara. William Maxwell: A Literary Life. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005. ISBN 9780252075834
• Henson, Darold Leigh. "Social Consciousness in William Maxwell's Writings Based on Lincoln, Illinois", Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, vol. 98, mo. 4 (Winter 2005):254-286.
• Marrs, Suzanne (ed.). What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.
• Wilkinson, Alec. My Mentor: A Young Man's Friendship with William Maxwell. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 2002. ISBN 9780618123018

External links

• Works by or about William Keepers Maxwell, Jr. in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• William Maxwell, The Paris Review
• The Gentle Realist, New York Times
• Love, Bill, Chicago Magazine
• A Master is Given His Due, The Wall Street Journal
• William Maxwell, the 'Wisest, Kindest' Writer, NPR interview with Maxwell by Terri Gross
• William Maxwell: Celebration of His Work and Life on YouTube
• Ben Cheever and Dan Menaker Discuss William Maxwell on YouTube
• Edward Hirsch, Dan Menaker and Ben Cheever Discuss William Maxwell on YouTube