A: Maxwell’s 1980 novel So Long, See You Tomorrow was my introduction to his work. At the time I read it, I lived around the corner from the Illinois State Historical library in Springfield, the archive that sent him copies of the old Lincoln newspapers that helped him to write the book. Living only thirty miles from Maxwell’s hometown, I knew the sensibility and landscape intimately. I delved through the records myself to find the accounts Maxwell had used to tell the story of the 1920s scandal: the love affair between a tenant farmer’s wife and her husband’s best friend, who is shot and killed while milking one morning. However, it was the humanity of the narrator that drew me in: he spoke with a striking simplicity, a combination of empathy and intellect that I found fresh and rare.

Q: How did you meet William Maxwell?

A: When I was a graduate student at the University of Illinois, I wrote a review of The Outermost Dream, Maxwell’s collection of essays and reviews. Mr. Maxwell was kind enough to write and thank me for it, and our correspondence began. A few years later, I got the opportunity to interview him for a literary magazine and went to New York. When the cab pulled up to his building on East Eighty-Sixth Street, I stood for a moment looking up at the apartments and across the street to the park on the river’s edge. I remembered his words about the writer Colette in The Outermost Dream — how he stood day after day looking up at the windows of the Palais-Royal in Paris, wondering which window was hers and feeling what he called a “pull like that of the moon on the ocean” — a pull precipitated by her writing. Now Maxwell was the one inside.

Q: What was your first impression of him?

A: When he opened the door to his apartment that first day, I could tell that I was in the presence of someone very much like the narrator in So Long, See You Tomorrow. It was as if he walked out of the book. He was gentle, yet assured. He was physically delicate, but a strength of spirit, a vitality shown from his eyes.

Q: Can you describe your interviews with him?

A: On that first visit, Mr. Maxwell took me to a small back room filled with papers, odd furniture, photos, and his daughter Brookie’s drawing of the park on the East River, which became the cover art for his first story collection. He had switched from a manual to an electric typewriter only in later years and preferred answering questions on his clattering Coronamatic. “I think better on the typewriter than I do just talking,” he told me. So, after carefully considering each of my queries, he rolled a sheet of paper into his typewriter and composed for up to five minutes at a time. Once satisfied, he turned the typewriter stand around on its squeaky wheels so I could read his response.

Q: This interview process seems a bit unusual.

A: I understand why you say that, but communicating through the typewriter seemed natural for Maxwell — even personal — probably as a result of his spending six decades crafting stories on the keyboard. His hands were nimble and sinewy and seemed to embody the power and tenderness of his works. John Blades of the Chicago Tribune aptly likened his hands to “tree roots photographed in slow motion.”

Q: Did you also interview Maxwell at his country home?

A: Yes. The next summer, he picked me up at the Croton-Harmon railway station wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat and drove me to his country home in Yorktown Heights. When we got there, he suspended a long extension cord through the back window and brought his typewriter outdoors, where we sat for two afternoons at a picnic table overlooking the rolling lawn, his flower beds, and his wife’s art studio. One image remains especially clear: Mr. Maxwell agilely swinging his legs over the suspended extension cord that was nearly waist high. He was in his early eighties at the time and scissor-kicked over the cord like a man half his age. We sat side-by-side at the table for two days, which allowed me to read his answers as he typed them — and to get plenty of photos, one of which became the cover for this book. I could ask follow-up questions immediately, which made for a smooth interchange — a true conversation.

Q: You also interviewed John Updike for the book. Can you describe that experience?

A: I invited Mr. Updike to speak at an event honoring Mr. Maxwell for donating his papers to the University of Illinois. After he decided to make the trip, Updike asked if we would be anywhere near Lincoln, Maxwell’s hometown and the setting for much of his fiction. I told him we would be, and he wrote back, “On to Lincoln!” One of Mr. Maxwell’s cousins shepherded us through the town. We visited the streets and houses, the farms, fields, and cemeteries Maxwell wrote about. Most of my interview with Mr. Updike took place in the car as we drove through the flat cornfields of Maxwell’s central Illinois that April day.

Q: Correspondence between Maxwell and other New Yorker writers played a part in your research for the book. Can you recall any particularly memorable letters?

A: Yes. Mr. Maxwell began writing notes to friends who were dear to him in the final days of his life. On the day he died, he wrote a brief and moving goodbye to John Updike, who received it several days after Maxwell died.

In the book I also write about a postcard from Eudora Welty picturing the famous dining tables at the Mendenhall Restaurant in Mendenhall, Mississippi. Diners could spin bowls of fried chicken, corn pudding and other southern dishes around lazy-susan style. She wrote Maxwell that the table would have been “good in the Beulah,” the fictional hotel in her novel, The Ponder Heart, which appeared in The New Yorker before it was published as a novel dedicated to Maxwell.

Q: In addition to Updike and Welty, who were some of the other writers whose work Maxwell edited at The New Yorker?

A: Maxwell also worked with John Cheever, J.D. Salinger, Vladimir Nabokov, Mary McCarthy, and John O’Hara, among many others.

Q: What was Maxwell’s approach to editing?

A: Maxwell edited with a light touch. He said that he wanted to be sure writers “said what they meant and meant what they said,” and to guide them toward what he called their “essential quality.” More than any other editor at The New Yorker, Maxwell developed intimate personal friendships with nearly all of his writers.

Q: How did editing at The New Yorker affect Maxwell’s own writing?

A: Maxwell said that editing helped him to streamline his own prose, and this is particularly evident in his late work. By the time he published So Long, See You Tomorrow in 1980, he said that all he wanted was to say exactly what he meant “in the only exact way of saying it.” Working so intently with other writers’ prose helped him to refine his own.

Q: Clearly, editing was an important facet of Maxwell’s career. When the tables were turned, who edited Maxwell’s work and what kind of experiences did he have with them?

A: When Maxwell submitted So Long, See You Tomorrow to The New Yorker in 1979, he met with a few adamant objections from William Shawn, the magazine’s general editor at the time; in fact, Shawn made thirty-three queries about the manuscript in a memo to Roger Angell, Maxwell’s editor. Shawn censored some of the tenant farmer’s courser language, but he seemed most bothered by the way Maxwell wrote from a dog’s point of view in parts of the story. This led to some humorous exchanges between Shawn, Angell, and Maxwell.

At Knopf, Judith Jones handled Maxwell in a very sensitive way when she worked with him on The Chateau and Ancestors. She made sure that copy editors did not change the Midwestern dialect he recreated in his books.

Q: Were there any surprises in Maxwell’s archive of manuscripts?

A: Yes. In the 1950s, Maxwell wrote a play that remains unfinished and untitled, but that was fully conceived, a nearly complete draft in three acts with scenes already written and rewritten. Surprisingly, he experiments with science fiction and transports a character based on his mother from the afterlife to contemporary New York and Illinois via high-tech airplane travel. This drama was one way Maxwell worked through prolonged grief — he brought his mother back to life, which was a technique encouraged by his analyst, who also plays a major role in the play. In terms of his writing, Maxwell developed new narrative approaches by experimenting with this drama, and in it we find some of the imagery he used twenty-five years later in So Long, See You Tomorrow, his final novel.

Q: Maxwell returned over and again to the death of his mother in his novels and short stories. How did he manage to repeatedly revisit this tragedy and keep his writing fresh?

A: Maxwell’s mother died when he was ten years old, during the influenza epidemic of 1918 to 1919. He did not intend to keep returning to his mother’s death, yet it was the central fact of his life and work and kept resurfacing when he wrote fiction taken from some aspect of his own experience. He kept the material fresh by reconsidering it from different vantage points as he aged and by continually experimenting with different narrative techniques. This evolution in his view of the past and his own sense of literary form suggests how he developed as an artist over many decades.

Q: Who were Maxwell's own literary influences?

A: Maxwell was aware that his greatest literary influences were women. He was fortunate to meet the Pulitzer-prize winning author, Zona Gale, who was from Wisconsin, while he was still in high school. She served as an example of how he could turn his own experience in the American heartland into serious fiction. Virginia Woolf was the most important influence on his early novels. Later in his career, he recognized that his work had more in common with Willa Cather’s, although he said that she arrived at her streamlined prose through Flaubert, while he arrived at his by remembering how people spoke in his Illinois childhood. In New York, the poet and critic Louise Bogan also mentored him.

Q: What do you think are some of Maxwell’s greatest strengths as a writer?

A: The purity of his prose style and his powerful embrace of emotional experience. And perhaps no body of American writing so fully captures the development of one person from childhood through old age. The sense of place in his fiction is also important.

Q: Can you talk a little bit about the importance of the Midwest in his work?

A: Maxwell called Illinois his “imagination's home.” He remembered the town of Lincoln as a changeless world, the way it was in 1923 when he left at the age of fourteen to join his remarried father and family in Chicago. Even though he spent his adult life in New York, he always returned, in his fiction, to this childhood home: to the social atmosphere, the home life, the language, and the landscape of the place. He had a keen ear for the subtleties of the region’s dialect, and I find that the flat landscape, its bareness and sense of exposure, is echoed in his unadorned prose.

Q: What about New York? How did living in New York for all those years affect him and his work?

A: His work ultimately benefits from a mingling of the regional and the cosmopolitan, as his native Midwest meets the New York of his adulthood. As a result of his experiences in New York, his work became increasingly complex: he developed a detached intellect and objectivity that contributed to the power of all his works — particularly those about the Midwest. Also, his analysis in New York with Theodor Reik had a profound affect on his writing — especially on his 1945 novel The Folded Leaf.

Q: Maxwell’s fiction spans from the 1930s to the 1990s. How did his writing change over the decades?

A: The critic Brian McHale has written about twentieth century authors who began their careers as modernists and ended as postmodernists, and Maxwell fits into this category. As a young writer he was highly influenced by the modernists he read in college — Virginia Woolf and the poets Elinor Wylie and Walter de la Mare. These influences are apparent in his first novel Bright Center of Heaven and to a lesser extent in They Came Like Swallows. As he developed his own voice, these influences dropped away. About half-way through his career, he began to experiment more with the novel form. This experimentation culminated in So Long, See You Tomorrow, where the design of his fiction became part of the story itself and the boundaries between fact and fiction blurred.

Q: What do you believe is Maxwell’s finest work?

A: So Long, See You Tomorrow has a sense of gemlike refinement. It treats the essential truths of a life in 135 pages with pure, refined prose and a spare, yet elegant structure. Although it is less than half the length of his earlier novels Time Will Darken It and The Chateau, it is the most compressed yet complete statement of his perennial themes. Perhaps most importantly, his decades of experimentation with fiction writing dovetail with the continual examination of his life's material in this final novel.

Q: What did you hope to accomplish with this book?

A: I hope that the book helps illuminate and interpret the patterns in Maxwell’s literature. I try to examine his evolving approach to fiction writing and convey the rich experience of reading his work. The book opens with the story of his young life, which gave him much of the material for his fiction, and then moves to the unfolding of his literary life. Each chapter begins with the life circumstances that affected his writing and weaves a portrait of the author with discussion of his works.

Q: Was there anything that didn’t make it into the book that you’d like to share?

A: There are many things. But one comes immediately to mind: on one visit to see the Maxwell’s, Mrs. Maxwell had broken her hip and was using a walker. As she walked with it, she carried herself with a posture and presence that reminded me of Audrey Hepburn. She was regal. This image encapsulates her grace, the dignity and love she brought to William Maxwell’s life.