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William Maxwell: Early Novels and Stories
William Maxwell
Bright Center of Heaven / They Came Like Swallows / The Folded Leaf / Time Will Darken It / Stories 1938-1956
Library of America
February 2008
On Sale: January 10, 2008
920 pages
ISBN: 159853016X
EAN: 9781598530162
Hardcover
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Fiction
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 Þction. Set against the background of
the Spanish ßu 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 ofÞng-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 Þction collects his lighthearted
Þrst 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 Þction as he practiced it.
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