He came from what he called “the dead center of Illinois” and ended up in the heart of 20th Century American literature, a quiet giant of an editor and novelist whose prose was described by one critic as “immaculate.”
Yet William Maxwell remained oddly unknown beside the other literary lights associated with the Midwest: Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow.
His death Monday at 91 in his New York home, eight days after the death of his wife of 55 years, Emily, caught only a glimmer of the national spotlight. Yet it was widely noted in the literary circles of New York, where Maxwell edited the works of major authors such as John Updike, Eudora Welty and J.D. Salinger during 40 years as fiction editor of The New Yorker.
His favorite subject for his own prose was Illinois and the Midwest, where he calmly chronicled the painful, lyrical moments of domestic life with ineffable grace and clarity.
“He’s as thoroughly Midwestern as any writer has been,” said Alec Wilkinson, author and lifelong friend. “Perhaps only Hemingway is as Midwestern as Maxwell.
“He’s wildly underappreciated,” added Wilkinson, who profiled his mentor last year in The New Yorker.
Novelist Richard Bausch declared, “He’s better than almost anyone he edited.”
Perhaps it was because Maxwell recorded the rhythms of Midwestern life–his favorite setting for novels such as “They Came Like Swallows” (1937) and “Time Will Darken It” (1948)–with such understated, silken prose that he was lavishly praised by critics yet never figured in the public consciousness in a way that did his talent justice. While not best sellers, his works glowed in many readers’ minds like a porch light at dusk.
He was a Maxwell Perkins who might also have given Thomas Wolfe a few pointers.
Maxwell was born in Lincoln, Ill., in 1908. While he spent all of his adult life in New York, his imagination invariably drifted back to the Midwest.
His life was split in another way as well: He was equally accomplished as a writer and editor.
“He managed a rare and divided life, and as a writer and as an editor he was an original,” said David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker.
Despite rubbing shoulders with some of the biggest names in American fiction–John Cheever, Vladimir Nabokov, Frank O’Connor, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Mary McCarthy–Maxwell was a Midwesterner through and through, said those who knew him best.
“He thought of the Midwest all the time,” recalled novelist Charles Baxter, a friend of Maxwell who has taught “So Long, See You Tomorrow” (1980) in classes at the University of Michigan.
“He told me that he was able to see the inside of the house in Lincoln; he could walk through it and see everything that was there. Then having seen it all, he could finally leave it.
“Those aren’t the words of someone who has left Illinois behind–those are the words of someone who has taken it with him,” Baxter said.
Maxwell’s brother, Robert Maxwell, 81, was reached at his law offices Tuesday in Oxnard, Calif. He described William as “a very sweet person. He stayed away from situations where he’d sound like he had a swelled head.”
Robert Maxwell was 2 days old and William was 10 when their mother, Eva Blinn Maxwell, died in the 1918-19 influenza epidemic. Her death, chronicled in the semi-autobiographical novel “So Long, See You Tomorrow,” was the defining event in his brother’s life, Robert Maxwell said.
“He didn’t really want to talk too much about it, but you could tell.”
Shortly thereafter, their father remarried and the family moved to Chicago, where Maxwell attended Nicholas Senn High School, on the city’s Far North Side.
Baxter declared, “He’s one of the best writers America has ever had, whose central subject has to do with loss and recovery.”
Years later, as a student at the University of Illinois, Maxwell still was haunted by his mother’s death, as he wrote in his memoir “Ancestors”: “When I was in college I was wakened out of a sound sleep by my own voice, answering my mother, who had called to me from the stairs. With my heart pounding, I waited for more and there wasn’t any more.”
After graduate work at Harvard and Cambridge Universities, Maxwell returned to the University of Illinois as an English instructor. From there, he moved to New York and began his illustrious career at The New Yorker. He returned to Illinois infrequently, his brother said, because “he was not a great traveler.”
The writers with whom he worked revered his steady, reasonable hand with their work. “I know so many other men who would’ve first had to establish who they were or forced their style on you,” said Wilkinson. “He was without artifice.”
Bausch said: “He was not only generous in practical ways, but in letting you know he considered you to be the real article. He attended to what you had done.”
Updike, who has always given Maxwell credit for improving his early stories in The New Yorker, is writing an appreciation of his mentor in the magazine’s Aug. 14 issue. As Updike told the Tribune in 1992: “He was a good editor because he wasn’t trying to shape you into somebody else. He was very good at not doing more than was needed.”
Maxwell’s work did receive some acclaim. In 1995, he won the Tribune’s Heartland Award for “All the Days and Nights: The Collected Stories.” “So Long, See You Tomorrow” won the American Book Award.
But he was never as well-known as the writers he edited, a fate that might have irked other authors but never seemed to faze Maxwell, according to his friends and colleagues. He produced a reliable stream of novels, memoirs, short stories, book reviews and literary essays, all of which bore the stamp of his subdued but luminous way of seeing the world.
The one notable geographic departure for his novels was “The Chateau” (1961), set in France, though it chronicled the experiences of a visiting American couple.
National Public Radio book commentator Alan Cheuse called Maxwell “the best writer to come out of the Midwest since [F. Scott] Fitzgerald.”
Such superlatives probably would have made Maxwell blush. In 1992, he told the Tribune, “When I was a child, the people around me said exactly what they meant, in a simple language. What I long to do is find the simple, natural way of saying exactly what I mean. That’s definitely a Midwestern trait, I like to think.”
In “Ancestors,” Maxwell wrote, “I have always liked my name. This may be because of the people I was surrounded with as a child. When they used my name, or my brother’s, or for that matter one another’s, it was almost always with affection, which somehow rubbed off on the name itself.
“William Maxwell–to hold it off at arm’s length–is not a common name and neither is it exactly uncommon.”
The same was said repeatedly about Maxwell’s work, about sentences that moved gently back and forth across the page like a glider on the veranda.
“He had such great love of the Midwest,” said Bausch, “and such great respect for how life is lived there.”
