Updike on William Maxwell

In The New Yorker, John Updike celebrates the centennial of writer and editor William Maxwell.

Novel after novel, the reconciliation of art and actuality continued to present stimulating difficulties for Maxwell. In describing, in this magazine, his friend the poet Louise Bogan, upon her death, in 1970, he said, “In whatever she wrote, the line of truth was exactly superimposed on the line of feeling”: such an exacting superimposition represented his ideal.