Discipline: Literature

William Maxwell

Discipline: Literature
Region: New York, NY
MacDowell Fellowships: 1935
William Maxwell (1908-2000) was an American editor, novelist, short story writer, essayist, children's author, and memoirist. He served as a fiction editor at The New Yorker from 1936 to 1975. An editor devoted to his writers, Maxwell became a legendary mentor and confidant to many of the most prominent authors of his day. Although best known as an editor, Maxwell was a highly respected and award winning novelist and short story writer. His award-winning fiction, which is increasingly seen as some of the most important of the 20th century, has recurring themes of childhood, family, loss and lives changed quietly and irreparably. In 1968 he was elected president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Since his death in 2000 several works of biography have appeared, including A William Maxwell Portrait: Memories and Appreciations (W. W. Norton & Co., 2004), My Mentor: A Young Man's Friendship with William Maxwell by Alec Wilkinson (Houghton-Mifflin, 2002), and William Maxwell: A Literary Life by Barbara Burkhardt (University of Illinois Press, 2005). In 2008 the Library of America published the first of two collections of works by William Maxwell, Early Novels and Stories, edited by Christopher Carduff. His collected edition of William Maxwell's fiction, published to mark the writer's centenary, was completed by a second volume, Later Novels and Stories in the fall of 2008.

Studios

Wood

William Maxwell worked in the Wood studio.

Wood Studio, given to the residency program by Mrs. Frederick Trevor Hill, was completed in 1913 in memory of Mrs. Hill’s mother, Helen Ogden Wood. Like Schelling Studio, the building is sided with large, overlapping pieces of hemlock bark. When the studio was renovated in 1995, MacDowell staff researched the origins of this unusual building material and…

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