All the Days and Nights: The Collected Stories - Paperback

by William Maxwell (Author)

From the National Book Award-winning author of So Long, See You Tomorrow comes a masterful collection of stories, spanning more than 50 years--the life's work of one of American's most widely and justly honored writers.

"Beautifully wrought. . . Maxwell writes with such clear-eyed sympathy for his characters. . . A radiant collection." --The New York Times

Whether he is writing about a small town in turn-of-the-century Illinois or a precariously balanced enclave of the good life on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, William Maxwell has the power to immerse us completely in his fictional worlds and to elicit our empathetic allegiance to his nuanced characters. The paper boy plying his route (and anxiously contemplating his awakening sexuality) under the all-seeing eye of God; the couple who come home one Christmas Day to find their house ransacked by burglars; the American tourist traveling through a France that has changed utterly since his last visit--in the hands of Maxwell, their stories become our own, at once fresh and familiar, unsettling and deeply comforting.

The twenty-one stories in All the Days and Nights span more than half a century and more layers of memory and feeling than are contained in most books of history. Together, they make up what their author calls "a Natural History of home."

Author Biography

William Maxwell was born in 1908 in Lincoln, Illinois. He studied at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and after earning a master's at Harvard, returned there to teach freshman composition before turning to writing. He published six novels, three collections of short fiction, an autobiographical memoir, a collection of literary essays and reviews, and a book for children. For 40 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.