Novels
- They Came Like Swallows (1937)
- The Folded Leaf (1945)
- Time Will Darken It (1948)
- The Chateau (1961)
- So Long, See You Tomorrow (1979)
Collections
- The Heavenly Tenants (1946)
- Stories (1956)
- The Old Man At the Railroad Crossing (1966)
- Over By the River and Other Stories (1977)
- Billie Dyer and Other Stories (1992)
- All the Days and Nights (1995)
- Mrs. Donald’s Dog Bun (1998)
- Early Novels and Stories (2008)
- The Old Man at the Railroad Crossing and Other Tales (2016)
Non fiction
- Ancestors (1971)
- The Outermost Dream (1989)
Novels Book Covers
Collections Book Covers
Non fiction Book Covers
William Maxwell Books Overview
They Came Like Swallows
First published in 1937, They Came Like Swallows was William Maxwell’s second novel. It tells of an ordinary American family overtaken by the devastating epidemic of the Spanish influenza of 1918. The book begins on the day before the armistice in a small midwestern town, and the events are seen from the perspective, in turn, of eight year old Peter Morison called Bunny; of his older brother, Robert; and of their father. They are witnesses to a domestic tragedy that is written with beauty and a quite magnificent tenderness. William Maxwell has been described by The Washington Post as ‘one of America’s most distinguished and distinctive stylists.’ John Updike has said that ‘Maxwell’s voice is one of the wisest in American fiction; it is, as well, one of the kindest.’ The Times Literary Supplement declares that ‘Maxwell offers us scrupulously executed, moving landscapes of America’s twentieth century, and they do not fade.’ The Saturday Review said,’They Came Like Swallows is one of those rare tales in which child hood is reflected in the simplicity and intensity of its own experience.’The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foundation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with afford able hardbound editions of impor tant works of literature and thought. For the Modern Library’s seventy fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoringas its emblem the running torch bearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inau gurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world’s best books, at the best prices.
The Folded Leaf
The path to adulthood is littered with broken relationships. In the suburbs of 1920s Chicago two boys form an unlikely friendship. Spud Latham is slow at school but quick to fight and a natural athlete Lymie Peters, thin, pigeon chested and terrible at games, is devoted to him. As they graduate from school to college, tensions start to surface. It is Lymie who first meets Sally Forbes, but it is Spud she falls in love with. This signals the end of their friendship and the rift is almost more than Lymie can bear.
Time Will Darken It
When Austin King entertains some distant relatives he unwittingly sets in motion events that will threaten his marriage, his law practice and his standing in the community. Austin’s eagerness to please his foster cousin Nora is mistaken for other motives, especially since Nora is besotted with him.
The Chateau
It is 1948 and a young American couple arrive in France for a holiday, full of anticipation and enthusiasm. But the countryside and people are war battered, and their reception at The Chateau Beaumesnil is not all the open hearted Americans could wish for.
So Long, See You Tomorrow
In this magically evocative novel, William Maxwell explores the enigmatic gravity of the past, which compels us to keep explaining it even as it makes liars out of us every time we try. On a winter morning in the 1920s, a shot rings out on a farm in rural Illinois. A man named Lloyd Wilson has been killed. And the tenuous friendship between two lonely teenagers one privileged yet neglected, the other a troubled farm boy has been shattered. Fifty years later, one of those boys now a grown man tries to reconstruct the events that led up to the murder. In doing so, he is inevitably drawn back to his lost friend Cletus, who has the misfortune of being the son of Wilson’s killer and who in the months before witnessed things that Maxwell’s narrator can only guess at. Out of memory and imagination, the surmises of children and the destructive passions of their parents, Maxwell creates a luminous American classic of youth and loss.
The Heavenly Tenants
The Marvell family unintentionally leaves their Wisconsin farm unattended when they visit their grandmother in Virginia, but a surprising group of close friends comes to the rescue. All ages.
The Old Man At the Railroad Crossing
Unique among Maxwell’s books, the 29 stories in this collection have the timeless quality of folk tales. Though the settings are modern, the concerns are as old as humanity, in the traditions of Aesop and the Brothers Grimm.
Over By the River and Other Stories
Twelve stories by the award winning author of So Long, See You Tomorrow.
All the Days and Nights
8 new stories and most of what was in his last three collections. ‘Beautifully wrought…
a radiant collection…
Maxwell writes with such clear eyed sympathy for his characters, such consumate knowledge of their place in a matrix of family and friends.’ The New York Times
Early Novels and Stories
Christopher Carduff, editor In 1934, at age 26, William Maxwell left small town Illinois for New York City, convinced that life and literature were elsewhere. ‘I had no idea then,’ he later wrote, ‘that three quarters of the material I would need for the rest of my writing life was already at my disposal. My father and mother. My brothers. The look of things. The Natural History of home…
All there, waiting for me to learn my trade and recognize instinctively what would make a story.’ With his second book, They Came Like Swallows 1937, Maxwell found his signature subject matter the fragility of human happiness as well as his voice, a quiet, cadenced Midwestern voice that John Updike has called one of the wisest and kindest in American ction. Set against the background of the Spanish u epidemic of 1918, this short novel presents the loving character of Elizabeth Morison, a devoted wife and mother, through the eyes of those whom she is fated to leave decades before her time. Edmund Wilson described The Folded Leaf 1945 as ‘a quite unconventional study of adolescent relationships between two boys, with a girl in the of ng in Chicago and in a Middle Western college: very much lived and very much seen.’ He praised this ‘drama of the immature’ for the compassion Maxwell brings to his male protagonists, whose intensely felt, unarticulated bond is beyond their inchoate ability to understand. Time Will Darken It 1948 is a drama of the mature: a good man’s struggle to keep duty before desire and his family’s needs before his own. It paints a portrait of Draperville, Illinois, in 1912, a proud and isolated community governed by gossip, where an ambitious young woman must not overreach the limits society has placed on her sex, and an older, married gentleman must not encourage her should she dare. Together with these major works, this Library of America edition of Maxwell’s early ction collects his lighthearted rst novel, Bright Center of Heaven 1934, out of print for nearly 70 years, and nine masterly short stories. It concludes with ‘The Writer as Illusionist’ 1955, Maxwell’s fullest statement on the art of ction as he practiced it.
Ancestors
The National Book Award winning author of So Long, See You Tomorrow offers an astonishing evocation of a vanished world, as he retraces, branch by branch, the history of his family, taking readers into the lives of settlers, itinerant preachers, and small businessmen, examining the way they saw their world and how they imagined the world to come.
The Outermost Dream
The Outermost Dream brings together essays and reviews by William Maxwell, one of America’s foremost writers and editors. Maxwell chose deliberately to focus on biography, memoir, diaries, and correspondence when reviewing books: ‘what people said and did and wore and ate and hoped for and were afraid of, and in detail after often unimaginable detail they refresh our idea of existence and hold oblivion at arm’s length.’ In reading his reviews, we are struck by Maxwell’s skill in choosing the one particular, the haunting moment, that further illuminates our understanding of the power of an individual life. His discernment is equally telling whether writing about literary luminaries such as Virginia Woolf, Lord Byron, E.B. White, Isak Dinesen, or delving into the diaries of an unknown Victorian curate with vivid dreams of murder and mayhem.
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