| William Keepers Maxwell, Jr. |
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Information AboutWilliam Keepers Maxwell, Jr. |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT WILLIAM KEEPERS MAXWELL, JR. | |
| 1908 births | |
| maxwell, william keepers | |
| 2000 deaths | |
| american novelists | |
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LIFE Maxwell was born in Lincoln, Illinois , and attended the University Of Illinois and Harvard University . He was best known as the fiction editor of '' The New Yorker '' magazine for forty years (1936-1976), where he worked with writers such as Vladimir Nabokov , John Updike , J.D. Salinger , John Cheever , Frank O'Connor , Frank O'Hara , Eudora Welty , and Isaac Bashevis Singer . As an editor Welty wrote of him: "For fiction writers, he was the headquarters." He also wrote six highly acclaimed novels, a number of short stories and essays, children's stories, and a memoir, ''Ancestors'' (1972). His award-winning fiction, which is increasingly seen as some of the most important of the 20th Century, has recurring themes of childhood, family, loss and lives changed quietly and irreparably. Much of his work is autobiographical, particularly concerning the loss of his mother when he was 10 years old growing up in the rural Midwest of America. He wrote of his loss "It happened too suddenly, with no warning, and we none of us could believe it or bear it... the beautiful, imaginative, protected world of my childhood swept away." Since his death in 2000 several works of biography have appeared, including ''A William Maxwell Portrait: Memories and Appreciations'' (W. W. Norton & Co., 2004) and ''William Maxwell: A Literary Life'' by Barbara Burkhardt (University of Illinois Press, 2005). BOOKS Novels
Short-story collections
Non-fiction
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