Conversations with William Maxwell

Conversations with William Maxwell collects over thirty interviews, public speeches, and remarks made by the esteemed novelist and New Yorker fiction editor. Spanning five decades, the interviews collectively address the entirety of Maxwell's literary work, with in-depth discussion of such work as They Came Like Swallows, The Folded Leaf, and the American Book Award-winning So Long, See You Tomorrow. The interviews also illuminate, at length, Maxwell's forty-year tenure as a fiction editor working with such writers as John Updike, John Cheever, Eudora Welty, Vladimir Nabokov, and J. D. Salinger. Maxwell's words, some previously unpublished, pay moving tribute to literary friends and mentors and offer reflections on the artistic life, the process of writing, and his midwestern heritage. All retain the reserved poignancy of his fiction. The volume publishes for the first time the full transcript of Maxwell's extensive interviews with his biographer Barbara Burkhardt, who is the editor of this volume. The book's introduction includes Maxwell's discussion of correspondence with Updike, Saul Bellow, and other luminaries. Barbara Burkhardt is associate professor of English at University of Illinois, Springfield. She is the author of William Maxwell: A Literary Life.