0
    • Elementary Secondary Higher Ed Common Reads
    0 0
    Download high-resolution image

    Ancestors

    A Family History

    Author William Maxwell
    Ebook
    Knopf | Vintage
    On sale Apr 28, 2010 | 320 Pages | 9780307481450
    Add to cart Add to list Exam Copies

    See Additional Formats
    From the National Book Award-winning author of So Long, See You Tomorrow comes an astonishing evocation of a vanished world, a book built from letters and journals, memory and speculation, and infused on every page with the vivid intimacy of a great novel.

    "Maxwell's sensitive prose is the good and careful tool of an artist who is always doing exactly what he means to do." —Eudora Welty

    Ancestors is the history of William Maxwell's family, which he retraces branch by branch across the wilderness, farms, and small towns of the nineteenth-century Midwest. He takes his readers into the lives of settlers, itinerant preachers, and small businessmen, and makes us understand the way they saw their world and the way they imagined the world to come. With the same precision and empathy he brought to his award-winning novels, Maxwell has transformed the family history into a rare and luminous work of the literary imagination.
    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. View titles by William Maxwell
    "An exploration of the past in which the novelist's imagination figures as large as the historian's research . . . notable for its quite humor, affectionate tone and, most of all, its sharp vision of another America." —The New York Times Book Review

    "Maxwell has so cool and sharp an eye. He is a master . . . a writer of impeccable English prose." —Wallace Stegner, The Washington Post Book World

    About

    From the National Book Award-winning author of So Long, See You Tomorrow comes an astonishing evocation of a vanished world, a book built from letters and journals, memory and speculation, and infused on every page with the vivid intimacy of a great novel.

    "Maxwell's sensitive prose is the good and careful tool of an artist who is always doing exactly what he means to do." —Eudora Welty

    Ancestors is the history of William Maxwell's family, which he retraces branch by branch across the wilderness, farms, and small towns of the nineteenth-century Midwest. He takes his readers into the lives of settlers, itinerant preachers, and small businessmen, and makes us understand the way they saw their world and the way they imagined the world to come. With the same precision and empathy he brought to his award-winning novels, Maxwell has transformed the family history into a rare and luminous work of the literary imagination.

    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 National Book Award and the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in 2000. View titles by William Maxwell

    Praise

    "An exploration of the past in which the novelist's imagination figures as large as the historian's research . . . notable for its quite humor, affectionate tone and, most of all, its sharp vision of another America." —The New York Times Book Review

    "Maxwell has so cool and sharp an eye. He is a master . . . a writer of impeccable English prose." —Wallace Stegner, The Washington Post Book World

    Additional formats

    Other Books by this Author

    Related Articles

    Books for LGBTQIA+ Pride Month Cover Titles: Stag Dance 9780593446355 THE REMARKABLE LIFE OF REED PEGGRAM 9780593654194 THE LILAC PEOPLE 9781640097667 One Day I'll Grow Up and Be a Beautiful Woman 9780593469576
    General

    Books for LGBTQIA+ Pride Month

    In June we celebrate Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, and Asexual + (LGBTQIA+) Pride Month, which honors the 1969 Stonewall riots in Manhattan. Pride Month is a time to both celebrate the accomplishments of those in the LGBTQ+ community and recognize the ongoing struggles faced by many across the world who wish to live

    Read more

    Books for LGBTQIA+ Pride Month

    General
    Subscribe

    Penguin Random House Higher Education

    © 2026 Penguin Random House

    Back to Top
    0
    Wish List (0)