It’s the birthday of author and legendary editor William Maxwell (1908-2000), not to be confused with another legendary editor, Maxwell Perkins (1884-1947). Maxwell was fiction editor at The New Yorker for forty years and edited the likes of John Updike, John Cheever, Eudora Welty, J.D. Salinger, Mary McCarthy, Vladimir Nabokov, and so on.

Maxwell was born in Lincoln, Illinois, one of three sons, and once said that his years growing up in Lincoln gave him “three-quarters of the material I would need for the rest of my writing life.” (Echoes of Flannery O’Connor, who once said that anyone who survived childhood had enough to write about for life.) Maxwell’s mother died in the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-19, a devastating experience for Maxwell, who later wrote, “the beautiful, imaginative, protected world of my childhood was swept away.” (NB: Death sucks. Mothers should never ever die.) He went to live with relatives in Bloomington, Illinois, eventually moving to Chicago with his father when his father remarried.

Maxwell was always an avid reader and initially wanted to write poetry but felt he wasn’t good enough at it (an instinct that, interestingly, often doesn’t stop people). He got his B.A. at the University of Illinois (1930) and his M.A. at Harvard (1931) and published his first novel, Bright Center of Heaven, in 1934. His second novel, They Came Like Swallows, was published in 1937 and drew heavily on his experience losing his mother, without being out-and-out autobiographical. (I haven’t read this novel, but even reading a *description* of it and of Maxwell’s handling of his eight-year-old character’s grief and vulnerability is powerful. See this article by John Updike.)

By now, Maxwell was working at The New Yorker as an assistant to Katharine White, fiction editor and wife of E.B. White; they became lifelong friends, and he eventually succeeded her in the position. In the midst of editing the century’s biggest authors, Maxwell wrote four more novels (including The Folded Leaf, 1945), short stories, a memoir, and a couple of children’s books. Maxwell contributed to The New Yorker until the year before his death. Unlike the subject of August 14th’s post, Maxwell’s literary reputation has only grown greater since his death.

Maxwell was married to Emily Gilman Noyes for 55 years and died eight days after she did. The couple had had a habit of his telling her stories in bed at night before falling asleep.

May you flourish on this fine Thursday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.