The writer William Maxwell (1908–2000) once spoke with an editor close to Willa Cather, who late in life had become rather reclusive, a mystery to the reading public. Maxwell asked, “What made her a writer?” and the editor replied: “Why, what makes anyone a writer—deprivation, of course.” Maxwell adds that the editor apologized for being “tactless,” and we might recall Philip Larkin joking that “deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.”

It’s no surprise that Maxwell remembered the Cather anecdote and even shared it in a 1963 speech he gave at his alma mater, the University of Illinois, sixty miles east of his birthplace of Lincoln. His mother died there in the 1918 influenza epidemic when Maxwell was ten years old. He went on to publish six novels and dozens of short stories, and hardly a sentence he wrote was uninformed by that early loss. As a young writer, Maxwell soon arrived at his enduring theme, what he called “the fragility of human happiness.”

The editor of The Writer As Illusionist, Alec Wilkinson, knew Maxwell from childhood and went on to work as a staff writer at The New Yorker, where Maxwell was the fiction editor for almost forty years. In 2002 Wilkinson published My Mentor: A Young Man’s Friendship with William Maxwell. Wilkinson has here gathered book reviews, journal entries, letters, speeches, and travel pieces from the magazine, most never before collected in book form, and tells us that he hoped