Forum / My Mentor: A Young Writer's Friendship with William Maxwell

• 
  Matt Dennison

  Jan 03, 11:08pm

  This looks very interesting. The entire book is not available to read, unfortunately, but what is is good. Section two contains more of Maxwell's thoughts on writing.

  You have to click on "contents," which contains several sections, and use the arrows to advance pages.

  http://books.google.com/books?id=rMfrgFU5P2MC&printsec=frontcover&dq=alec+wilkinson+william+maxwell&source=bl&ots=9Sc7yOVuMA&sig=RDEanUQGMLQrK1TYFQfsaSyVumA&hl=en&ei=ftJETMbqFoeesQOfyeXwDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CDEQ6AEwBA#v=twopage&q&f=false

• 
  Mary Guterson

  Jan 10, 04:00am

  william maxwell is god.
  i remember reading some of this in the NY times a long time ago. Have you ever read about his death?

• 
  Matt Dennison

  Jan 10, 04:04am

  I know NOTHING about him. Never heard of him, but what was available in the book excerpt was fascinating.

  The book said that he EDITED Nabokov, etc., when their stories appeared in the TNY.

  I would LOVE to be a fly on the wall (internal and external) during that process!

• 
  Bill Yarrow

  Jan 10, 06:01am

  Read They Came Like Swallows by Maxwell, but get the 1937 edition not the edition he revised (badly) decades later.

  Read also The Happiness of Getting It Down Right: Letters of Frank O'Connor and William Maxwell, 1945-1966.

  Maxwell: Good writer, interesting guy.

  (P.S. I didn't think the My Mentor book was very good. I guess I wanted it to be more about Maxwell and less about Wilkinson.)

• 
  Matt Dennison

  Jan 10, 06:21am

  "I guess I wanted it to be more about Maxwell and less about Wilkinson."

  I was surprised/disappointed with the amount of policeman stuff in the excerpt. It was okay, but...

  The letters sound like where the good stuff would be.

• 
  Matt Dennison

  Jan 10, 07:38am

  Found another book of correspondence (culled from 500 letters--from a 40-year exchange totaling 1,300 letters!) with a certain Sylvia Townsend Warner, an English author who had 153(!) stories edited by Maxwell and pubbed in The New Yorker.

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