Jonathan Yardley

In the spring of 1976, William Maxwell left his job as fiction editor of the New Yorker, where he had worked for four decades, in order to concentrate on his own writing. This came as unhappy news to any number of writers, for he had nursed along many of the best, giving them sympathy, patience, understanding, and a light but firm editorial hand. None was more distressed than Eudora Welty, with whom he had worked for nearly a quarter-century and who was especially dependent on his counsel, not to mention on a friendship that had long since deepened into platonic love.