William Maxwell: A Literary Life

William Maxwell: A Literary Life

Known as a beloved, longtime fiction editor at The New Yorker, William Maxwell worked closely with such legendary writers as Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, Mary McCarthy, and John Cheever. His own novels include They Came Like Swallows and the American Book Award-winning So Long, See You Tomorrow, and many consider him to be one of the twentieth century's most important writers. Barbara Burkhardt's William Maxwell: A Literary Life represents the first major critical study of this Illinois writer's life and work.Writing with an economy and elegance befitting her subject, Burkhardt addresses Maxwell's highly autobiographical fiction by skillfully interweaving his biography with her own critical interpretations. She contextualizes his fiction in terms of events including his mother's early death from influenza, his marriage, and the role of his psychoanalysis under the guidance of Theodor Reik. Drawing on a wide range of previously unavailable material, Burkhardt includes letters Maxwell received from authors such as Eudora Welty and Louise Bogan, excerpts from his unpublished manuscripts and correspondence, and her own interviews with Maxwell and key figures from his life, including John Updike, Roger Angell, New Yorker fiction editor Robert Henderson, and Maxwell's family and friends.From Publishers Weekly"I think better on the typewriter than I do just talking," William Maxwell told Burkhardt in one of their many meetings together in the nine years preceding his death, at 91, in 2000. Seated on the patio of his summer home, the novelist and former New Yorker fiction editor (who worked with such literary giants as Nabokov, Salinger and "the three Johns": Cheever, O'Hara and Updike) clacked out answers to her questions on his Coronamatic while Burkhardt, an assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois, read by his side. From these mechanized Q&A sessions, as well as from interviews with Maxwell's friends, family and colleagues, Burkhardt emerges with a comprehensive picture of the author's work as dominated by the recurring themes of childhood, psychoanalysis and maternal love. Maxwell lost his mother to the Spanish Flu at age 11, a defining experience that he claimed "made a novelist out of him." Recovering the "lost Eden" of his early years became his work's "central mission," and Burkhardt uses these autobiographical elements to analyze Maxwell's writing and correspondence. Because Maxwell dedicated himself to covering the same thematic ground in multiple books, however, and because Burkhardt's method is doggedly biographical, her interpretations can grow somewhat repetitive. After all, there are only so many ways to attach the number of young mothers who die in Maxwell's fiction to the one he lost in real life. Burkhardt's account of Maxwell's 40-year tenure at The New Yorker also falls somewhat short. She offers a few intriguing tidbits, like how Harold Ross and other editors used knitting needles to pinpoint unsatisfactory details in covers and cartoons, but fans looking for further insight into the magazine's history may be disappointed. Nevertheless, though the New Yorker anecdotes are few and far between, Burkhardt's exhaustive study of the author's life will be required reading for any devoted Maxwell enthusiast. 8 pages of b&w photos.Copyright