"I didn't want the things that I loved, and remembered, to go down to oblivion. The only way to avoid that is to write about them."

Conversations with William Maxwell collects over thirty interviews, public speeches, and remarks that span five decades of the esteemed novelist and New Yorker fiction editor's career. The interviews collectively address the entirety of Maxwell's literary work--with in-depth discussion of his short stories, essays, and novels including They Came Like Swallows, The Folded Leaf, and the American Book Award-winning So Long, See You Tomorrow--as well as his forty-year tenure as a fiction editor working with such luminaries as John Updike, John Cheever, Eudora Welty, Vladimir Nabokov, and J. D. Salinger.

Maxwell's words, some from remarks and speeches, some previously unpublished, pay moving tribute to literary friends and mentors and offer reflections on the artistic life, the process of writing, and his midwestern heritage. All retain the reserved poignancy of his fiction. The volume publishes for the first time the full transcript of Maxwell's extensive interviews with his biographer and, in an introduction, correspondence with writers including Updike and Saul Bellow.

Barbara Burkhardt, Washington, D.C., is associate professor of English at University of Illinois, Springfield. She is the author of William Maxwell: A Literary Life.

256 pages (approx.), 6 x 9 inches, introduction, chronology, index