William Maxwell

I have discovered William Maxwell. I knew vaguely that he had been a New Yorker editor working with such writers as Salinger, Cheever, and Updike, but I knew nothing about his fiction. I just read his second novel, They Came Like Swallows, which is a delightful book. You can tell he was a fan of Virginia Woolf, and the Midwestern family he shows us has a similar kind of dependence on the mother to keep their world right-side up that you see in To the Lighthouse. That’s all I’ll tell you, in case you haven’t read him. I’ll be reading The Folded Leaf next.