William Keepers Maxwell Jr

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William Keepers Maxwell, Jr. 1908–2000, American novelist, short-story writer, and editor, b. Lincoln, Ill. Educated at the Univ. of Illinois and Harvard, he began his career as a teacher, but soon turned to writing. In his fiction the discreet and courtly Maxwell often handled such traditional themes as growing up and the impact of death with a deft, spare, and gentle realism, frequently setting his tales in the early-20th-cent. Midwest of his youth. His six novels include Bright Center of Heaven (1934), They Came like Swallows (1937), Time Will Darken It (1948), and So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980). His stories are collected in All the Days and Nights (1995) and his essays in The Outermost Dream (1989). Maxwell also wrote children's stories and a memoir, Ancestors (1972). As the superb and subtle fiction editor of the New Yorker for 40 years (1936–76), he helped to shape the work of many of the century's finest writers, including Vladimir Nabakov, John Updike, J. D. Salinger, John Cheever, Flannery O'Connor, Frank O'Hara, Eudora Welty, and Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Bibliography: See biography by B. Burkhardt (2005); M. Steinman, ed., The Element of Lavishness: Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner and William Maxwell, 1938–1978 (2001); C. Baxter et al., ed., A William Maxwell Portrait (2004).

Maxwell, William (1908–2000),born in Illinois, graduated from the state university and, after an M.A. from Harvard, taught there briefly before trying his hand at a variety of jobs, including editorial work for The New Yorker. His novels include Bright Center of Heaven (1934); They Came Like Swallows (1937), about a woman of character and warmth who helps diverse people and leaves them to find themselves upon her death; The Folded Leaf (1945), quietly and tenderly treating the lives of two boys who are friends through school and college; Time Will Darken It (1948), about an impossibly idealistic man, set in Illinois in 1912; The Château (1961); The Old Man at the Railroad Crossing (1966); and So Long, See You Tomorrow (1979), about two 13‐year‐old boys whose friendship is abruptly ended after a murder in their Midwestern town. Over by the River (1977) collects stories. Ancestors (1971) is a history of the author's forebears and their religious views. The Writer as Illusionist (1955) studies fiction, and The Outermost Dream (1989) gathers some of his essays and book reviews, the latter mostly from The New Yorker.