Perhaps best known as a fiction editor at The New Yorker for more than forty years, William Maxwell has enjoyed an even longer career as a writer. Since the publication of his first book, Bright Center of Heaven, in 1934, he has written several novels, essays and reviews, a book-length family history, stories for children, and short stories. His stories fall into two distinct types: realistic traditional short fiction and short, moralistic fables, or "improvisations," as he calls them.

If Maxwell's long service as a fiction editor at The New Yorker shaped his writing, or if his aesthetic informed his editorial work, is unclear. It is indisputable, however, that he has established a reputation as a writer whose fiction has the kind of elegance for which the magazine is also known. As Sanford Pinsker wrote in his review of All the Days and Nights (1995), "Maxwell's stories ultimately find their...