Time Will Darken It - (Vintage International) by William Maxwell (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

From the National Book Award-winning author of So Long, See You Tomorrow comes a wryly funny yet deeply compassionate portrait of a small Illinois town in the early years of the twentieth century.

"A book that is as near perfection as it is possible to be." --The Boston Globe

When Austin King plays host to his distant Southern kinfolk. he unwittingly sets in motion events that will threaten his law practice, his marriage to his pregnant wife, and his standing in his tight-knit community. For Austin's eagerness to please his idealistic foster cousin, Nora, is all too easily mistaken for other motives--especially since Nora is all too obviously besotted with him.

Beautifully written, magically evocative, and filled with irony and wit, Time Will Darken It is further evidence that William Maxwell is one of our national treasures.

From the Back Cover

When Austin King plays host to his distant Southern kinfolk, he unwittingly sets in motion events that will threaten his marriage, his law practice, and his standing in the community. For Austin's eagerness to please his idealistic foster cousin, Nora, is all too easily mistaken for other motives--especially since Nora is all too obviously besotted with him. This book is further evidence that Maxwell is one of our national treasures.

Review Quotes

"Written with sympathy and restraint, and in a prose that is almost poetically direct and sure. . . . If you do not read Time Will Darken It, you will have missed something rare." --San Francisco Chronicle

"An artist who is always doing exactly what he means to do. . . . The story's quiet and accumulating power has a dark and distrubing beauty." --Eudora Welty

"No comparison does Maxwell justice. . . . [In] his fictional worlds we often encounter an intimacy so intense it literally gives us goose bumps." --Cleveland Plain Dealer

"He has a magic way with words. . . . Among the past half-century's few unmistably great novelists." --Village Voice

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.