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 (who worked with such literary giants as Nabokov, Salinger and "the three Johns": Cheever, O'Hara and Updike) clacked out answers to her questions on his Coronamatic while Burkhardt, an assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois, 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 as dominated by the recurring themes of childhood, psychoanalysis and maternal love. Maxwell lost his mother to the Spanish Flu at age 11, a defining experience that he claimed "made a novelist out of him." Recovering the "lost Eden" of his early years became his work's "central mission," and Burkhardt uses these autobiographical elements to analyze Maxwell's writing and correspondence. Because Maxwell dedicated himself to covering the same thematic ground in multiple books, however, and because Burkhardt's method is doggedly biographical, her interpretations can grow somewhat repetitive. After all, there are only so many ways to attach the number of young mothers who die in Maxwell's fiction to the one he lost in real life. Burkhardt's account of Maxwell's 40-year tenure at The New Yorker also falls somewhat short. She offers a few intriguing tidbits, like how Harold Ross and other editors used knitting needles to pinpoint unsatisfactory details in covers and cartoons, but fans looking for further insight into the magazine's history may be disappointed. Nevertheless, though the New Yorker anecdotes are few and far between, Burkhardt's exhaustive study of the author's life will be required reading for any devoted Maxwell enthusiast. 8 pages of b&w photos. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
William Maxwell insisted that his life could not be reliably narrated, which sets up an elegant puzzle for his first biographer, Barbara Burkhardt: how to recount the career of a writer whose most celebrated aphorism is "in talking about the past, we lie with every breath we draw." Burkhardt's solution is to narrate Maxwell's career as a natural extension of his coming-of-age, no small feat given how long Maxwell lived -- he died in 2000 at the age of 92 -- and how restlessly he transformed his past into an ever stranger unknown country.Burkhardt gives full and perceptive attention to Maxwell's unique stature as a writer firmly rooted in his upper Midwest homeland of Lincoln, Ill. Unlike many Midwestern contemporaries who repaired to Gotham to sever their provincial ties and launch new writerly identities, Maxwell stolidly worked and reworked the materials of his early 20th-century childhood in Lincoln as the basis for a six-novel opus that all but doubles as a single, sprawling and terminally unresolved Bildungsroman. "Perhaps no body of American writing so fully captures the development of one person from childhood through advanced years," Burkhardt writes, and as suspiciously sweeping as that claim sounds, it's difficult to deny.Burkhardt gives a thorough, closely researched account of Maxwell's maturation, from his early childhood in Lincoln -- fatally marked, as all admirers of his fiction well know, by his mother's tragic death, in 1919, during the worldwide influenza epidemic -- on through to his awkward adolescent years in Chicago and the University of Illinois and his five-decade tenure as fiction editor for the New Yorker under the storied editorships of Harold Ross and William Shawn. Maxwell's early life furnished the overwhelming bulk of his written work, and so, too, does Burkhardt trace its ongoing influence on her subject's later life: how a failed collegiate suicide attempt, for example, informed the plot of his novel The Folded Leaf (1945), or how his honeymoon in France shaped his experimental novel The Chateau (1960). Along the way, Burkhardt also catalogues Maxwell's many and far-flung intellectual influences, from Virginia Woolf and Theodore Reik to New Yorker colleagues and contributors such as Louise Bogan, Vladimir Nabokov and John Updike. Yet Burkhardt's book also strays from the chronicle of Maxwell's life and work, into the strictly academic business of literary taxonomy, and here it runs into trouble. She alerts readers in her introduction that she is out to demonstrate that "in small stages over many decades [Maxwell] pushed past his own practice to arrive at a distinctive form of American Postmodernism that" -- as all postmodernism everywhere seems to -- "questions and foregrounds how we come to understand the past" while boldly challenging "how we can ever know what 'really' happened." Like most such jargon-laden claims, this one is simultaneously grandiose and banal -- and more to the point, oddly irrelevant to Maxwell's writing.Yet Burkhardt fastens onto it as an interpretive lodestar, using the short novel universally acknowledged as Maxwell's masterwork, So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980), as the culmination of the alleged postmodern turn in his fiction. The novel is a spare, heartbreaking reminiscence of the consequences of an awkward teen social encounter between Maxwell and a childhood friend (given the pseudonym Cletus Smith) caught up in the aftermath of a scandalous murder committed by his father. It's true that Maxwell freely experimented with reconfigured chronologies and shifting points of view in the novel -- even famously narrating a stretch of it from the point of view of young Cletus's dog, Trixie. But it's far from clear how these flourishes -- delivered with Maxwell's characteristically Midwestern restraint and self-consciousness -- make his "definitive crossover to the postmodern mode."Still more puzzlingly, Burkhardt seeks to mark this breakthrough as a moment of spirited, not to say liberated, writerly self-reinvention, by which the unknowability of Maxwell's past gets alchemized from "an impediment" into "a motivation for him to create, to fictionalize, his own universe. In her reading, the novel's theme is its technique; the four central chapters of So Long, See You Tomorrow "are devoted solely to the writer's improvisational self." It's hard to understand how so close and careful a reader of Maxwell's fiction could so completely overlook the subject matter of the writer's crowning work. For So Long, See You Tomorrow, far from being an insular triumph of the writer's imagination, is composed in a mood of pained requiem: Maxwell needs to invent an imagined past because the one in which he failed to extend compassionate friendship to Cletus went horribly wrong. Indeed, So Long, See You Tomorrow is written almost entirely for the sake of Cletus, who enters barely at all into Burkhardt's discussion of the book. Even more baffling, she omits any mention of a crucial scene near the end of the novel, in which the then-72-year-old writer confesses to a fit of inconsolable sobbing on a New York City Street -- an episode clearly linked to the foregoing events in Cletus's story, and in any case scarcely the behavior of a newly minted postmodern scribe intoxicated by his own inventive powers. Yet despite such interpretive lapses, 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. And thankfully, for the rest, we still have the consummate work of Maxwell himself to serve as the scrupulously unsteady narrator of his own deceptively simple life. Reviewed by Chris Lehmann Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
There were two aspects to the career of Maxwell, who died in 2000. One was as a beloved fiction editor at the New Yorker, where he edited the work of many significant twentieth-century writers, including Eudora Welty and John Updike. He also was a fiction writer himself, the author of, among his six novels and many short stories, the award-winning and career-defining novel So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980). 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. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Known as a beloved, longtime fiction editor at The New Yorker, William Maxwell worked closely with such legendary writers as John Updike, Vladimir Nabokov, Mary McCarthy, and John Cheever. His own novels include They Came Like Swallows, and the American Book Award-winning So Long, See You Tomorrow, and have become so highly acclaimed that many now consider him to be one of the most important writers to come out of the Midwest in the twentieth century. Barbara Burkhardt's William Maxwell: A Literary Life represents the first major critical study of this Illinois writer's life and work." "Burkhardt addresses Maxwell's highly autobiographical fiction by interweaving a portrait of the author with her own critical interpretations. She begins each chapter with commentary on the life 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 Theodor 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 such as 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 Maxwell's own views on his life and work, which he shared with her in conversations and correspondence over a number of years.

FROM THE CRITICS

Chris Lehmann - The Washington Post

… 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. And thankfully, for the rest, we still have the consummate work of Maxwell himself to serve as the scrupulously unsteady narrator of his own deceptively simple life.

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