William Maxwell

Maxwell's mother died of influenza when he was ten, a loss he returned to obliquely across his fiction for the rest of his life. He worked as The New Yorker's fiction editor from 1936 to 1976, shaping the careers of Cheever, Salinger, Welty, and Updike among many others.

His own fiction, spare and largely autobiographical, appeared steadily but quietly alongside his editorial work; So Long, See You Tomorrow, drawn from a real Illinois farm murder near his childhood home, won the National Book Award in its paperback edition in 1982.

He married the designer Emily Noyes in 1945, and the two remained together until his death in New York in 2000, days after hers.