Nationality American Genre Domestic realism | Name William Maxwell, Role Editor | |
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Born August 16, 1908Lincoln, Illinois, United States ( 1908-08-16 ) Occupation Editor, novelist, short story writer Spouse Emily Gilman Noyes (m. 1945) Children Emily Maxwell, Katherine Maxwell Parents William Keepers Maxwell, Eva Blossom Blinn Maxwell Awards John Newbery Medal, PEN/Malamud Award Books So Long - See You Tomorrow, They Came Like Swallows, The Folded Leaf, Time Will Darken It, All The Days And Nights: T | ||
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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.
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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. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Illinois in 1930 where he was class salutatorian, poetry editor of The Daily Illini, a member of Sigma Pi fraternity. Maxwell earned a master's degree at Harvard University. Maxwell taught English briefly at the University of Illinois before moving to New York.
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."
In 1968 he was elected president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
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 55 years, with William's death following eight days after his wife's. 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.