William Maxwell Remembered in Madison Square Park

Yesterday was the eighth anniversary of the death of novelist, short story writer, and legendary New Yorker fiction editor William Maxwell, and the National Book Foundation marked the occasion by hosting an early-evening discussion at the north end of Madison Square Park. Christopher Carduff, who recently edited a two-volume omnibus of Maxwell’s fiction for the Library of America, described the author as “one of the essential American voices of our time,” and proposed that Lincoln, Illinois, where some of those best stories were set, is “as much a part of the American literary landscape as Hannibal, Missouri, or Yoknapatawpha County.”

Rather than read from that fiction, though, the guest speakers shared their personal reminiscenses of Maxwell. Dan Menaker, the former Random House editor (now an online talk show host, with the possibility of a second season of Titlepage in the fall), discussed how Maxwell gave him his first big break, at the fiction department of the New Yorker:

(That’s Edward Hirsch sitting next to Menaker, by the way.)

During that time, Menaker added, as Maxwell began to acknowledge his notes on other writer’s stories, he submitted some of his own fiction; when Maxwell accepted some stories, he then turned in some poems that had already been rejected by another editor at the magazine. Maxwell took the poems on a Wednesday and gave them back on Thursday, Menaker recalled: “He handed them back to me and said, ‘Stick to prose.’” (As Ben Cheever,another of the evening’s speakers, recalled, Maxwell was a gentle man, but he was known for being “more true than kind.”)

Stewart O’Nan actually never met Maxwell, he admitted, but he attributed his own literary career to discovering a copy of So Long, See You Tomorrow in a used bookstore more than twenty years ago and being moved to emulate Maxwell’s transformation of his youthful experiences into searingly honest art. “I had no idea of his gigantic backstory,” O’Nan said, though he quickly learned, and eventually wrote to Maxwell in gratitude and was thrilled when an unexpected reply came. He still recommends So Long to people to this day: “It’s 135 pages and there’s a lot of white space on those pages,” he observed. “You could read this entire book instead of watching that crappy movie on Starz tonight.”

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