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 mentor and confidant to many authors.
Maxwell was born in Lincoln, Illinois, on August 16, 1908. His parents were William Keepers Maxwell and Eva Blossom (née 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, the boy was sent to live with an aunt and uncle in Bloomington, Illinois. His father remarried, and young Maxwell joined him in Chicago. He attended Senn High School. He received his B.A.summa cum laude from the University of Illinois in 1930 where he was class salutatorian, elected to Phi Beta Kappa,[1] poetry editor of The Daily Illini,[2] and a member of Sigma Pi fraternity.[3] Maxwell earned an A.M.atHarvard University.[4] Maxwell taught English briefly at the University of Illinois where he served as faculty advisor to his fraternity and published an article about it in the fraternity's magazine[5] before moving to New York.
He also wrote six novels, short stories and essays, children's stories, and a memoir, Ancestors (1972). His fiction 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 and growing up in rural Midwestern United States. After the flu epidemic, young Maxwell had to move away from his house, which he referred to as the "Wunderkammer" or "Chamber of Wonders". He spoke 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."[7]
Maxwell was a friend and correspondent of the English writer Sylvia Townsend Warner, and was her literary executor. He edited a volume of her letters, and a further volume of his correspondence with her, The Element of Lavishness, was published in 2001.
Since his death in 2000, several biographical works about him have been published, including A William Maxwell Portrait: Memories and Appreciations (W. W. Norton & Co., 2004), My Mentor: A Young Man's Friendship with William MaxwellbyAlec 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 Maxwell, Early Novels and Stories, edited by Christopher Carduff. His collected edition of Maxwell's fiction, published to mark the writer's centenary, was completed by publication of the second volume, Later Novels and Stories, in the fall of 2008.
William Maxwell married 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 55 years. Maxwell died eight days after his wife.[9] They had two daughters, Katherine and artist and curator Emily Brooke ("Brookie") Maxwell.[10] 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".
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) ISBN978-1-59853-026-1
Later Novels and Stories: The Château / So Long, See You Tomorrow / Stories and Improvisations 1957 – 1999 (Library of America, 2008)
^So Long won the 1982 award for paperback Fiction. From 1980 to 1983 in National Book Awards history there were dual hardcover and paperback awards in most categories. Most of the paperback award-winners were reprints, including this one.
Baxter, Charles, Michael Collier and Edward Hirsch (eds.). A William Maxwell Portrait: Memories and Appreciations. New York: Norton, 2004. ISBN978-0-393-05771-3
Burkhardt, Barbara (ed.). Conversations with William Maxwell. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012. ISBN9781617032547
Burkhardt, Barbara. William Maxwell: A Literary Life. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005. ISBN9780252075834
Marrs, Suzanne (ed.). What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.
