William Maxwell was born in 1908, in Lincoln, Illinois. When he was fourteen his family moved to Chicago and he continues his education there and at the University of Illinois. After a year of graduate work at Harvard he went back to Urbana and taught freshman composition, and then turned to writing. He has published six novels, three collections of literary essays and reviews, and a book for children. For forty years he was a fiction editor at The New Yorker. From 1969 to 1972 he was president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, He received the Brandeis Creative Arts Award Medal and, for So Long, See You Tomorrow, the American Book Award and the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in 2000.

The National Book Award-winning author of So Long, See You Tomorrow offers an astonishing evocation of a vanished world, as he retraces, branch by branch, the history of his family, taking readers into the lives of settlers, itinerant preachers, and small businessmen, examining the way they saw their world and how they imagined the world to come.