The simplest things are often not what they seem.
—William Maxwell, The Château

. . . who knows what oversensitive is, considering all there is to be sensitive to.
—William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

In an age when editors of literary fiction increasingly prefer the sensationally modish to the quietly accomplished, when tastemakers at glossy magazines look upon twenty-eight-year-old first novelists as superannuated, and when supposedly serious critics neglect distinctive new novels in order to gush over the latest well-nigh interchangeable specimens of Brat Pack minimalism— in such an age, what could be more démodé than a thoroughgoing enthusiasm for William Maxwell?¹ For over half a century, Maxwell—now in his ninth decade—has gone his serene and unsplashy way, producing a new book every five years or so, all the while steadily accumulating one of the most admirable oeuvres in contemporary American letters. Though he could hardly be described as an unknown, Maxwell—who was born in 1908, and grew up in the Illinois town of Lincoln and in Chicago—has never enjoyed the fame of such contemporaries as, say, Richard Wright (b. 1908), Eudora Welty (b. 1909), or Mary McCarthy (b. 1912). Maxwell’s fellow novelists and short-story writers (many of whom benefited from his decades of editorial service at The New Yorker) have sung his praises melodiously among themselves—indeed, he is a near-textbook case of a “writer’s writer”—but he has been accorded little attention in the prominent literary journals, and even less in the halls