William Maxwell - A Literary Life
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About the Author
Barbara Burkhardt is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Springfield and holds a Ph.D. in American literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, William Maxwell's alma mater. During the last ten years of Maxwell's life, she conducted extensive interviews with him on regular visits to his homes in New York City and Westchester County, New York. Since Maxwell liked to answer questions on his clattering Coronamatic, he carefully considered her queries, rolled a sheet of paper into the typewriter and composed. The result was more than fifty pages of manuscript for William Maxwell: A Literary Life. Through the years, Burkhardt and Maxwell had more informal conversations about his own literature and that of other writers he admired, his forty-year editing career at The New Yorker, and his life experience generally.

As a result of their association, Maxwell entrusted Burkhardt with organizing his voluminous archive of literary correspondence with such writers as Eudora Welty, J.D. Salinger, John Updike, John Cheever, Mary McCarthy, and Vladimir Nabokov. As a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Burkhardt continued responsibility for working with the author on his literary correspondence. In conjunction with this project, she spoke on a panel with John Updike honoring Maxwell and his donation of papers to the University of Illinois library in 1997. She wrote a catalogue, "From the Illinois Prairie to The New Yorker: The Life and Work of William Maxwell" for the Maxwell exhibit associated with this event and was keynote speaker for a subsequent exhibit at the Illinois State Library.

In recognition of her scholarship, Burkhardt received the Robert Hacke Scholar-Teacher Award of the College English Association and an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Lincoln College, where she also delivered the Ralph Newman Memorial lecture in 2000. She received the Writer of the Year Award in the nonfiction category from Lincoln Library in Springfield, Illinois for an early manuscript of William Maxwell: A Literary Life, and has been interviewed on public radio.

Her reviews and articles have appeared in publications including the San Francisco Chronicle, Illinois Issues, and MidAmerica, and she has presented papers and delivered lectures on Maxwell, Vladimir Nabokov, Eudora Welty, and Langston Hughes at the Modern Language Association annual conventions and other academic conferences and symposia around the country.

At the University of Illinois at Springfield, she teaches graduate seminars on postmodern fiction, Mark Twain, and writers of The New Yorker, as well as courses on the American novel, Midwestern literature, Latino/Latina literature, and professional writing.