My Mentor tribute to writer, friend
By
Thomas Bligh
special Correspondent
Posted June 16 2002
My Mentor: A Young Man's Friendship
with William Maxwell. Alec Wilkinson. Houghton Mifflin. $22. 192 pp.
William Maxwell has been called a writer's writer, which suggests his books
are highly literary and difficult. They are not. They're merely beautifully
written. His novels often concern a lost childhood in the Midwest, with themes
of friendship and fractured families.
So Long, See You Tomorrow, which won the American Book Award in 1980, and
1948's Time Will Darken It are considered his finest novels, though his earlier
books, They Came Like Swallows and The Folded Leaf, made his reputation.
They Came Like Swallows is in the Modern Library.
Yet no biography of Maxwell has been published to date, nor has anyone published
a full-length study of his works. This has much to do with Maxwell's other
career as a fiction editor at The New Yorker, where for over 40 years he
edited such literary giants as J.D. Salinger, John Updike, Eudora Welty,
Mary McCarthy, and Vladimir Nabokov.
His day job took time away from his novels. Maxwell died in July 2000, and
Alec Wilkinson's memoir of their 25-year friendship is a great tribute to
a writer who seldom drew attention to himself.