William Maxwell

Abstract

William Maxwell (b. 1908–d. 2000) was born in Lincoln, Illinois, and lived there until he was fourteen, when he moved to Chicago. He attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and then spent a year at Harvard, where he earned an MA in 1931. He then returned to Urbana, where he took graduate courses and taught freshman composition for two years. In 1936, Maxwell moved to New York City and found work at the New Yorker, where he served for forty years, first in the art department and then as a fiction editor. In 1945, Maxwell married Emily Gilman Noyes, and the couple had two children, Katherine Farrington and Emily Brooke. As a fiction editor, he worked with such notable writers as John Cheever (b. 1912–d. 1982), Vladimir Nabokov (b. 1899–d. 1977), Frank O’Connor (b. 1903–d. 1966), John O’Hara (b. 1905–d. 1970), V. S. Pritchett (b. 1900–d. 1997), J. D. Salinger (b. 1919–d. 2010), John Updike (b. 1932–d. 2009), and Eudora Welty (b. 1909–d. 2001). From 1969 to 1972, he served as president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. During the course of his lifetime, he published six novels, two collections of stories, two collections of tales (one printed privately), a volume of collected stories, a family history, a volume of essays and reviews, and two books for children. The defining event in Maxwell’s life was the death of his mother in the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic. In the 1985 Godine edition of the novel The Chateau, a “Note about the Author” appears on the final page, and in this note Maxwell recalls his mother’s death: “It happened too suddenly, with no warning, and we none of us could believe it or bear it. My father’s face turned the color of ashes and stayed that way a whole year. The nightmare went on and on.” The subject of his mother’s death is treated, either directly or indirectly, in a number of his works, including his final novel, So Long, See You Tomorrow, which won the William Dean Howells medal and the National Book Award. In addition to these and other awards that honor individual works, Maxwell received several awards for lifetime achievement, including the Gold Medal for lifetime achievement in the category of Fiction from the American Institute of Arts and Letters and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, which recognizes a body of work that exemplifies excellence in the short-story genre.