So Long, See You Tomorrow: National Book Award Winner

· Sold by Vintage
4.2
6 reviews
Ebook
144
Pages
Eligible

About this ebook

In this magically evocative novel, William Maxwell explores the enigmatic gravity of the past, which compels us to keep explaining it even as it makes liars out of us every time we try. On a winter morning in the 1920s, a shot rings out on a farm in rural Illinois. A man named Lloyd Wilson has been killed. And the tenuous friendship between two lonely teenagers—one privileged yet neglected, the other a troubled farm boy—has been shattered. Fifty years later, one of those boys—now a grown man—tries to reconstruct the events that led up to the murder. In doing so, he is inevitably drawn back to his lost friend Cletus, who has the misfortune of being the son of Wilson's killer and who in the months before witnessed things that Maxwell's narrator can only guess at. Out of memory and imagination, the surmises of children and the destructive passions of their parents, Maxwell creates a luminous American classic of youth and loss.

Ratings and reviews

4.2
6 reviews
A Google user
February 7, 2012
Essentially, a perfect short novel, deftly playing the chords of New Yorker-style personal narrative, fact and memory, childhood and much-analyzed age. Deeply affecting as a story, with beautiful details, and constantly surprising in its low-key method. This isn't the only way to write, of course, but it's one important way that's familiar and meaningful to all of us, and no one has ever done it better than Maxwell did here.
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John Kelly
January 3, 2023
Very nice, bringing back memories of the Midwest.
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Jason Buckle
May 10, 2013
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About the author

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 American Book Award and the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in 2000.

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