Maxwell: The New Yorker fiction editor

It is the birthday of editor and writer William Maxwell (1908), who was fiction editor for The New Yorker magazine from 1936 to 1975, and in that position served as mentor to such literary luminaries as John Cheever, Vladimir Nabokov, John O'Hara, J.D. Salinger, Isaac Bashevis Singer, John Updike, and Eudora Welty, who said of him, "For fiction writers, he was the headquarters." Maxwell also wrote six novels and numerous short stories. His novels include Bright Center of Heaven (1934), They Came Like Swallows (1937), The Folded Leaf (1945), Time Will Darken (1948), The Chateau (1961), and So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980). Maxwell was still contributing to The New Yorker at 91. He died within a year.