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William Maxwell: Later Novels and Stories

The Château | So Long, See You Tomorrow | Stories and Improvisations 1957–1999 More

Edited by Christopher Carduff

“It warms the heart to hold almost all of Maxwell’s fiction in two sizable, relatively imperishable Library of America volumes, timed to be published a hundred years after his birth.” — John Updike, The New Yorker

Overview
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Table of Contents

Overview

News Adopt This Book: William Maxwell: Later Novels and Stories
August 2, 2023

Influences Ling Ma: William Maxwell, Bret Easton Ellis, and how fiction can do the impossible
August 17, 2018

Influences Sarah Manguso: Thoreau, Annie Dillard, William Maxwell, and “lessons of constraint” on 300 Arguments
March 8, 2017

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In the works included in this second volume of Maxwell’s collected writings, William Maxwell draws the reader close with narratives that blur the line dividing memoir and fiction. While he continues to explore his signature subject matter—one boy’s life in small-town Illinois—he also broadens his canvas to depict scenes from adult experience. His protagonists include a young American intoxicated by postwar France, a middle-aged New Yorker tending the illusion of family happiness like a pot of African violets, an old man haunted by shame and loss and regret. His voice, always one of the wisest and kindest in American fiction, now becomes also one of the most intimate, a quiet Midwestern voice that communicates the melancholy joy of being alive and of seeing things exactly as they are.

The Château (1961) is a story of innocence–innocence rebuffed but sometimes also rewarded with the return of affection and wonder. The setting is France in 1948, the place and its people still recovering from the German occupation. A newlywed American couple spends two weeks in the Loire Valley at the château of Mme Viénnot, an impoverished aristocrat whose actions and motivations are inscrutable to her paying guests. These young Americans are anything but ugly. They are earnest and generous, misunderstood and misunderstanding, and, like their hostess, exquisitely vulnerable.

So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980) is an Old Testament tragedy played out on the Illinois prairie. It is told by a witness to this tragedy’s devastation—an old man much like Maxwell who, some 60 years after the murderous events he describes, struggles to forgive his failure to reach out to the survivors. Part autobiographical memoir, part imaginative re-creation of a crime of passion, it is unique in form and, in the words of Charles Baxter, “an unobtrusively perfect example of literary art.”

In these two works Maxwell reaches the summit of his art as a novelist, but he is no less a master when he takes up shorter forms. All his best short stories are collected here, including “Over by the River” and “The Thistles in Sweden,” two classic evocations of New York City life, and the complete contents of Billie Dyer (1992), a companion volume to So Long, See You Tomorrow collecting seven fictionalized portraits of figures from Maxwell’s youth. The volume concludes with 40 delightful “improvisations”—fairy tales that Maxwell wrote mainly to entertain his wife—and the essay “Nearing Ninety” (1997), his moving valediction to a lifetime of reading and storytelling.

Christopher Carduff, editor, is a longtime publishing professional who collaborated with William Maxwell on several of his later projects. He currently serves as the Books Editor of The Wall Street Journal.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
News & Views

News Adopt This Book: William Maxwell: Later Novels and Stories
August 2, 2023

Influences Ling Ma: William Maxwell, Bret Easton Ellis, and how fiction can do the impossible
August 17, 2018

Influences Sarah Manguso: Thoreau, Annie Dillard, William Maxwell, and “lessons of constraint” on 300 Arguments
March 8, 2017

News Eudora Welty and William Maxwell: Letters formed a fifty-year friendship
April 12, 2016
Table of Contents

The Château

Stories 1963–1976
A Final Report
The Value of Money
A Game of Chess
The Poor Orphan Girl
The Gardens of Mont-Saint-Michel
Over by the River
The Thistles in Sweden

So Long, See You Tomorrow

Billie Dyer and Other Stories
Billie Dyer
Love
The Man in the Moon
With Reference to an Incident at a Bridge
My Father’s Friends
The Front and the Back Parts of the House
The Holy Terror

Stories 1986–1999
Grape Bay (1941)
The Lily-White Boys
What He Was Like
The Room Outside

A Set of Twenty-one Improvisations

Other Improvisations

Nearing Ninety

Appendix
Preface to The Château
Preface to So Long, See You Tomorrow
Preface to All the Days and Nights: The Collected Stories of William Maxwell
Remarks upon accepting the Gold Medal in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-026-1 990 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 184 Library of America Series

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