Ancestors - by William Maxwell (Paperback)

About the Book

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.

Book Synopsis

From the National Book Award-winning author of So Long, See You Tomorrow comes an astonishing evocation of a vanished world, a book built from letters and journals, memory and speculation, and infused on every page with the vivid intimacy of a great novel.

"Maxwell's sensitive prose is the good and careful tool of an artist who is always doing exactly what he means to do." --Eudora Welty

Ancestors is the history of William Maxwell's family, which he retraces branch by branch across the wilderness, farms, and small towns of the nineteenth-century Midwest. He takes his readers into the lives of settlers, itinerant preachers, and small businessmen, and makes us understand the way they saw their world and the way they imagined the world to come. With the same precision and empathy he brought to his award-winning novels, Maxwell has transformed the family history into a rare and luminous work of the literary imagination.

Review Quotes

"An exploration of the past in which the novelist's imagination figures as large as the historian's research . . . notable for its quite humor, affectionate tone and, most of all, its sharp vision of another America." --The New York Times Book Review

"Maxwell has so cool and sharp an eye. He is a master . . . a writer of impeccable English prose." --Wallace Stegner, The Washington Post Book World

About the Author

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 National Book Award and the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in 2000.