Barbara Burkhardt’s William Maxwell: A Literary Life represents the first major critical study of this well known Illinois writer’s life and work.

William Maxwell, Barbara Burkhardt, PEN, William Maxwell: A Literary Life, University of Illinois, Barbara A. Burkhardt, The New Yorker, Manhattan, Lincoln Illinois, Eudora Welty, John Updike, Louise Bogan, So Long See You Tomorrow, The Folded Leaf, Time Will Darken It, The Chateau, Bright Center of Heaven, They Came Like Swallows, Ancestors, Over by the River, The Outermost Dream, Midwest, Midwestern Literature, University of Illinois Press, University of Illinois at Springfield, Roger Angell, Westchester County New York, Editing, John Cheever, Chicago Illinois, PEN/Malamud Award, Folger Shakespeare Library, 1918, Theodor Reik, Urbana Illinois, Champaign Illinois, Virginia Woolf

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Praise for William Maxwell: A Literary Life

From The Chicago Tribune - Click to read the entire review
“[A] rare triumph. Burkhardt describes Maxwell's fiction as ‘writing that vividly preserves the past and earns a permanent place in American letters with its powerful embrace of emotional experience and the beauty of its prose style.’ The same can be said for this brilliant biography.

In deeply layered, supple, and clear prose, Burkhardt captures the dramas of Maxwell's life, from his Midwestern boyhood . . . to his decades of work as an editor at The New Yorker and his death mere days after the passing of his beloved wife, Emmy. . . . Burkhardt explores Maxwell's fiction as though opening a door to a new world, a world as wide as the prairie skies that define Maxwell's imaginative universe, and she deftly integrates her analysis of Maxwell's novels and stories with his life story. The blend is smooth--the life illuminates the fiction, the fiction illuminates the life. With deep learning--but blessedly free of the arcane jargon of much scholarship – Burkhardt explicates the methods, aims and accomplishments of Maxwell's fiction, along with the process of his personal and aesthetic maturation. . . .

Maxwell's life is interesting in its own right, Burkhardt's prose is stellar, and the cumulative effect of the book should send readers off to read Maxwell's fiction again, or for the first time.”

From The Washington Post
"Burkhardt gives full and perceptive attention to Maxwell's unique stature as a writer" and "a thorough, closely researched account of Maxwell's maturation, from his early childhood . . . through to his awkward adolescent years . . . and his five-decade tenure as fiction editor for The New Yorker under the storied editorships of Harold Ross and William Shawn. . . . William Maxwell: A Literary Life very capably opens discussion of a long-overlooked writer, and sheds much useful light on his coming-of-intellectual age."

From Newsday
"William Maxwell: A Literary Life is compelling, worthy and respectful of the subject's own writing."

From The London Times
"Especially [helpful] in its account of Maxwell's literary origins: his sense of a Midwestern identity, and of the debt he owed to such women writers as Edith Wharton, Cather, and his own mentor, the now-forgotten Zona Gale."

From Booklist
"Maxwell gets his due in this combination of biography and critical study by a writer who not only copiously studied his work but also worked with him to ensure the accuracy of the biographical side of her book. Maxwell's grounding in the Midwest and the impact of his mother's early death are developed as biographical features that greatly influenced his fiction writing, and the compassionate side of his nature is certainly seen here as a major component of his ability to edit famous names for a famous magazine. Let us hope that this solid book will work as a guarantee against future neglect."

From Publishers Weekly
"'I think better on the typewriter than I do just talking,' William Maxwell told Burkhardt in one of their many meetings together in the nine years preceding his death, at 91, in 2000. Seated on the patio of his summer home, the novelist and former New Yorker fiction editor . . . clacked out answers to her questions on his Coronamatic while Burkhardt . . . read by his side. From these mechanized Q&A sessions, as well as from interviews with Maxwell's friends, family and colleagues, Burkhardt emerges with a comprehensive picture of the author's work . . . . Burkhardt's exhaustive study of the author's life will be required reading for any devoted Maxwell enthusiast."

From Library Journal
"Burkhardt, a close acquaintance of Maxwell, uses a variety of sources, including personal letters and interviews with Maxwell and some of his friends and colleagues, to create this at once scholarly and personal study of Maxwell's life and writings."

From Illinois Times
"Barbara Burkhardt . . . has turned her substantial knowledge of Maxwell’s work and her unprecedented access to his papers into the first major critical study of this important Illinois author. . . . At her first meeting with Maxwell in Manhattan in 1991, Burkhardt discovered that it would not be an ordinary “type” of interview. After each question, he inserted a piece of paper into his Coronamatic and hammered out his answer. . . . That he continued to see her often, even asking her to catalog his correspondence, attests to the trust he felt in her abilities. He would not be disappointed. Burkhardt’s own prose is by turns spare, straightforward, and rich. . . . Her careful explication is literary criticism at its best — free of the jargon that makes much of this genre unreadable. . . . Those familiar with Maxwell’s work are reminded how good it is. For those who haven’t had the pleasure of his company, William Maxwell: A Literary Life will serve as a fine introduction."

From ForeWord Magazine
"Thoroughly researched and perceptive biography of the acclaimed author and former editor of The New Yorker."