So Long, See You Tomorrow

So Long, See You Tomorrow PDF Author: William Maxwell
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 030778987X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
In this magically evocative novel, William Maxwell explores the enigmatic gravity of the past, which compels us to keep explaining it even as it makes liars out of us every time we try. On a winter morning in the 1920s, a shot rings out on a farm in rural Illinois. A man named Lloyd Wilson has been killed. And the tenuous friendship between two lonely teenagers—one privileged yet neglected, the other a troubled farm boy—has been shattered. Fifty years later, one of those boys—now a grown man—tries to reconstruct the events that led up to the murder. In doing so, he is inevitably drawn back to his lost friend Cletus, who has the misfortune of being the son of Wilson's killer and who in the months before witnessed things that Maxwell's narrator can only guess at. Out of memory and imagination, the surmises of children and the destructive passions of their parents, Maxwell creates a luminous American classic of youth and loss.

So Long, See You Tomorrow

So Long, See You Tomorrow PDF Author: William Maxwell
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 030778987X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
In this magically evocative novel, William Maxwell explores the enigmatic gravity of the past, which compels us to keep explaining it even as it makes liars out of us every time we try. On a winter morning in the 1920s, a shot rings out on a farm in rural Illinois. A man named Lloyd Wilson has been killed. And the tenuous friendship between two lonely teenagers—one privileged yet neglected, the other a troubled farm boy—has been shattered. Fifty years later, one of those boys—now a grown man—tries to reconstruct the events that led up to the murder. In doing so, he is inevitably drawn back to his lost friend Cletus, who has the misfortune of being the son of Wilson's killer and who in the months before witnessed things that Maxwell's narrator can only guess at. Out of memory and imagination, the surmises of children and the destructive passions of their parents, Maxwell creates a luminous American classic of youth and loss.

They Came Like Swallows

They Came Like Swallows PDF Author: William Maxwell
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 144643477X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Discover William Maxwell’s classic, heart-breaking portrait of an ordinary American family struck by the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic 'A story of such engaging warmth that it would thaw the heart of any critic... Will melt many a reader to tears’ TIME Elizabeth Morison is an ordinary woman. Yet, to eight-year-old Bunny, his mother is the centre of his universe. To Robert, her elder son, she is someone he must protect against the dangers of the outside world. And to her husband, James, she is the foundation on which his family rests and life without her is unimaginable. As the dark winter of 1918 dawns and the shadow of Spanish flu starts to disturb day-to-day life, a moving portrait of Elizabeth takes shape, set against the lives and fate of the Morison family. ‘As you read They Came Like Swallows, you catch yourself from time to time being astonished at how tightly you're gripping the pages... There isn't a word that has dated. It could have been written yesterday, or tomorrow’ Nicholas Lezard, Guardian

Ancestors

Ancestors PDF Author: William Maxwell
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0679759298
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
The National Book Award-winning author of So Long, See You Tomorrow offers an astonishing evocation of a vanished world, as he retraces, branch by branch, the history of his family, taking readers into the lives of settlers, itinerant preachers, and small businessmen, examining the way they saw their world and how they imagined the world to come.

F.B. Eyes

F.B. Eyes PDF Author: William J. Maxwell
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400852064
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
How FBI surveillance influenced African American writing Few institutions seem more opposed than African American literature and J. Edgar Hoover's white-bread Federal Bureau of Investigation. But behind the scenes the FBI's hostility to black protest was energized by fear of and respect for black writing. Drawing on nearly 14,000 pages of newly released FBI files, F.B. Eyes exposes the Bureau’s intimate policing of five decades of African American poems, plays, essays, and novels. Starting in 1919, year one of Harlem’s renaissance and Hoover’s career at the Bureau, secretive FBI "ghostreaders" monitored the latest developments in African American letters. By the time of Hoover’s death in 1972, these ghostreaders knew enough to simulate a sinister black literature of their own. The official aim behind the Bureau’s close reading was to anticipate political unrest. Yet, as William J. Maxwell reveals, FBI surveillance came to influence the creation and public reception of African American literature in the heart of the twentieth century. Taking his title from Richard Wright’s poem "The FB Eye Blues," Maxwell details how the FBI threatened the international travels of African American writers and prepared to jail dozens of them in times of national emergency. All the same, he shows that the Bureau’s paranoid style could prompt insightful criticism from Hoover’s ghostreaders and creative replies from their literary targets. For authors such as Claude McKay, James Baldwin, and Sonia Sanchez, the suspicion that government spy-critics tracked their every word inspired rewarding stylistic experiments as well as disabling self-censorship. Illuminating both the serious harms of state surveillance and the ways in which imaginative writing can withstand and exploit it, F.B. Eyes is a groundbreaking account of a long-hidden dimension of African American literature.

A William Maxwell Portrait

A William Maxwell Portrait PDF Author: Charles Baxter
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393057713
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Writers who knew and were inspired by William Maxwell--revered as one of the 20th century's great American writers--offer intimate essays, most specifically written for this volume.

Conversations with William Maxwell

Conversations with William Maxwell PDF Author: Barbara Burkhardt
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1628468149
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
Conversations with William Maxwell collects thirty-eight interviews, public speeches, and remarks that span five decades of the esteemed novelist and New Yorker editor’s career. The interviews collectively address the entirety of Maxwel’s literary work—with in-depth discussion of his short stories, essays, and novels including They Came Like Swallows, The Folded Leaf, and the American Book Award–winning So Long, See You Tomorrow—as well as his forty-year tenure as a fiction editor working with such luminaries as John Updike, John Cheever, Eudora Welty, Vladimir Nabokov, and J.D. Salinger. Maxwell’s words spoken before a crowd, some previously unpublished, pay moving tribute to literary friends and mentors, and offer reflections on the artistic life, the process of writing, and his midwestern heritage. All retain the reserved poignancy of his fiction. The volume publishes for the first time the full transcript of Maxwell’s extensive interviews with his biographer and, in an introduction, correspondence with writers including Updike and Saul Bellow, which enlivens the stories behind his interviews and appearances.

My Mentor

My Mentor PDF Author: Alec Wilkinson
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780618382699
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
A compelling reflection on wisdom, friendship, and the craft of writing, My Mentor is also the touching story of a young man's education at the hands of a master, William Maxwell. At age twenty-four, Alec Wilkinson approached Maxwell in hopes of being taught to write. A quarter century of friendship followed. As a fiction editor of The New Yorker, Maxwell was unquestionably one of the past century's most respected editors; as the author of the masterpieces They Came Like Swallows and So Long, See You Tomorrow, he was one of its greatest American writers. His unparalleled ear for language and eye for detail, his depth of understanding and experience, make his instructions on writing an essential guide to the craft. In honoring this great man of letters, Wilkinson creates a "deft and sympathetic portrait" (New York Times Book Review).

William Maxwell

William Maxwell PDF Author: Barbara A. Burkhardt
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252030185
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
Best known as the longtime fiction editor at The New Yorker, William Maxwell worked closely with greats like Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, Mary McCarthy, John Cheever, and many others. His own novels include They Came Like Swallows and So Long, See You Tomorrow, and have become so highly acclaimed that many now consider him to be one of the twentieth-century's most important writers. Barbara A. Burkhardt's William Maxwell: A Literary Life represents the first major critical study of Maxwell's life and work.Writing with an economy and elegance befitting her subject, Burkhardt addresses Maxwell's highly autobiographical fiction by skillfully interweaving his biography with her own critical interpretations. She begins each chapter with commentary on the biographical circumstances and literary influences that affected each of his compositions. By contextualizing his novels and short stories in terms of events including his mother's early death from influenza, his marriage, and the role of his psychoanalysis under the guidance of Theodore Reik, Burkhardt's subsequent literary analyses achieve an unprecedented depth.Drawing on a wide range of previously unavailable material, Burkhardt includes letters written to Maxwell by authors like Eudora Welty and Louise Bogan, excerpts from Maxwell's unpublished manuscripts and correspondence, and her own interviews with key figures from his life, including John Updike, Roger Angell, New Yorker fiction editor Robert Henderson, and Maxwell's family and friends. She also presents several lengthy sessions with Maxwell himself.A must for anyone already familiar with the understated charms of Maxwell's writing, this volume also represents a major addition to the growing collection of New Yorker lore, sure to fascinate anyone interested in the fiction, history, and personalities connected with the most influential weekly.Barbara A. Burkhardt is an assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois at Springfield. A close acquaintance of Maxwell, she organized his correspondence for the Maxwell archives at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign library, as well as writing the catalog for two exhibitions.

New Negro, Old Left

New Negro, Old Left PDF Author: William J. Maxwell
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231114257
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Maxwell uncovers both black literature's debt to Communism and Communism's debt to black literature, reciprocal obligations first incurred during the Harlem Renaissance.

What There Is to Say We Have Said

What There Is to Say We Have Said PDF Author: Suzanne Marrs
Publisher: HMH
ISBN: 0547549245
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 529

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Book Description
Letters revealing a lost literary world—and a unique friendship between a brilliant author and a New Yorker editor. For over fifty years, Eudora Welty and William Maxwell, two of our most admired writers, penned letters to each other. They shared their worries about work and family, literary opinions and scuttlebutt, and moments of despair and hilarity. Living half a continent apart, their friendship was nourished and maintained by their correspondence. What There Is to Say We Have Said bears witness to Welty and Maxwell’s editorial relationship—both in Maxwell’s capacity as New Yorker editor and in their collegial back-and-forth on their work. It’s also a chronicle of the literary world of the time; they talk of James Thurber, William Shawn, Katherine Anne Porter, J. D. Salinger, Isak Dinesen, William Faulkner, John Updike, Virginia Woolf, Walker Percy, Ford Madox Ford, John Cheever, and many more. It is a treasure trove of reading recommendations. Here, Suzanne Marrs—Welty’s biographer and friend—offers an unprecedented window into two intertwined lives. Through careful collection of more than three hundred letters as well as her own insightful introductions, she gives us “a vivid snapshot of 20th-century intellectual life and an informative glimpse of the author-editor relationship, as well a tender portrait of devoted friendship” (Kirkus Reviews).