Maxwell, William Keepers, Jr.

▪ 2001

      American editor and writer (b. Aug. 16, 1908, Lincoln, Ill.—d. July 31, 2000, New York, N.Y.), as a fiction editor at The New Yorker magazine, spent some four decades collaborating with, encouraging, and polishing the prose of some of the most notable writers of the 20th century, among them John Updike, Mary McCarthy, J.D. Salinger, John Cheever, Vladimir Nabokov, Eudora Welty, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and John O'Hara. In addition, he wrote a number of books, including six novels, three collections of short stories, and a volume of essays and reviews, much of which was informed by the death of his mother during the influenza epidemic of 1918–19, when he was 10 years old. Maxwell was educated at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (B.A., 1930) and Harvard University (M.A., 1931) and then taught at Illinois for two years. With one novel, Bright Center of Heaven (1934), to his credit and a second one begun, he moved (1936) to New York City. In order to continue writing, he secured part-time work at The New Yorker, at first in the art department but then, after a few months, as a fiction and poetry editor. Maxwell was known for his sensitivity to the writer's own voice and sought only to make the works clear and unconvoluted, and he found that his attention to other authors' works also helped him in his own writing. His later novels were They Came like Swallows (1937), The Folded Leaf (1945), Time Will Darken It (1948), The Chateau (1961), and So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980), the last of which won the American Book Award. Other books included the children's fantasy The Heavenly Tenants (1946); the short-story collections The Old Man at the Railroad Crossing and Other Tales (1966), Over by the River, and Other Stories (1977), and Billie Dyer and Other Stories (1992); the memoir Ancestors (1971); and the essay collection The Outermost Dream (1989). His stories were also collected in All the Days and Nights (1995).

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