Today we can see that he was one of the missing links in this shift, which has been credited to writers he worked with at The New Yorker, including Salinger and Updike, along with others like Saul Bellow, James Baldwin and Bernard Malamud.īorn in 1908 in Lincoln, an Illinois prairie town, Maxwell, thin, sickly and bookish, was his mother's 'angel child' and basked in her presence his older brother, manly and mischievous, was his father's son. But already his fiction foreshadowed the postwar turn toward the intimate, the domestic, the introspective. Maxwell began publishing in the 1930's, when social novels like 'Studs Lonigan,' +'U.S.A.' and 'The Grapes of Wrath' were the fashion and historical novels like 'Anthony Adverse' and 'Gone With the Wind' were widely read. Men and women long at rest in the cemetery but vividly remembered.' The cast of larger-than-life-size characters - affectionate aunts, friends of the family, neighbors white and black - that I was presented with when I came into the world.

Maxwell's new readers could scarcely know that he had been rehearsing elements of the same painful story since 1937, when he brought out his second novel, 'They Came Like Swallows.' Introducing his collected stories, 'All the Days and Nights,' in 1994, Maxwell recalled boarding a freighter for Martinique back in 1933, searching for new experiences to write about: 'I had no idea that three-quarters of the material I would need for the rest of my writing life was already at my disposal. And in 1980, it was Welty who presented him with the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, for the best novel of the last five years. Salinger, Vladimir Nabokov and Eudora Welty.

From 1936 to 1976 he had been a fiction editor at The New Yorker, working with (and often befriending) writers like John Updike, Flannery O'Connor, J. The author, William Maxwell, was in his early 70's and this was his sixth novel, not his first. It had a deceptively casual title, 'So Long, See You Tomorrow,' yet quickly became a book many readers fervently loved and pressed on their friends. In 1980 a slim novel appeared that introduced a 'new' writer to the American public.

So long see you tomorrow