Jonathan Yardley is the book critic of the Washington Post. His own most recent book is Second Reading: Notable and Neglected Books Revisited (Europa, 2011). Among other honors, Yardley received the Pulitzer Prize for criticism and served as a Nieman fellow at Harvard.
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...