Readers curious about the universal praise for this quiet, underappreciated author found a collection of writing that vividly preserves the past and earns a permanent place in American letters with its powerful embrace of emotional experience and the beauty of its precise prose style. His death in Manhattan in July 2000, at age ninety-one, made the front pages of The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, both of which made high claims for his place in twentieth-century literature, claims repeated in publications across the country and abroad. More took notice in the 1990s when Random House reissued sixty years of his fiction and nonfiction in its Vintage International series. Many American readers discovered Maxwell in the mid-1980s when Godine Press revived his work in elegant paperback editions graced by the cover art of his younger daughter, Brookie. They became a consistent source of material as he developed new fictional practices and challenged the bounds of the novel form. Yet even as he sought to preserve memories, he continually refigured and reexamined them. He often wrote of his native Lincoln, Illinois as it was before his mother's premature death during the 1918 influenza epidemic. For Maxwell, this process was guided by a historical imagination, a desire to make successive inquiries into the past.
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