William Maxwell

Born in Lincoln, Illinois, William Keepers Maxwell Jr. lost his mother to the 1918 flu pandemic when he was 10 years old. The dramatic end to his childhood affected him greatly, and later on family, loss and lives changed suddenly became recurring themes in his work. Maxwell grew up in Chicago and did his undergraduate degree at the University of Illinois and master’s degree at Harvard. After briefly teaching English at the University of Illinois, he moved to New York where he became a fiction editor at the New Yorker magazine for nearly four decades, working with writers such as Sylvia Townsend Warner, Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, J. D. Salinger and Isaac Bashevis Singer among others.

Maxwell published six novels, the first of which Bright Center of Heaven came out in 1934, as well as numerous short stories and essays and a memoir entitled Ancestors (1972). His best-known novel, So Long, See You Tomorrow was published in 1979 and won the American Book Award. The book depicts two lonely teenagers in rural Illinois who forge a delicate friendship, only for it to be severed by a sudden and tragic incident. This captivating classic gathered fresh momentum in 2025 as a true word-of-the-mouth phenomenon sparked by enthusiastic booksellers and was shortlisted for the Waterstones Book of the Year 2025. Maxwell passed away in 2000 in New York City.