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Publisher comments: Maxwell weaves this story with that of his playmate Cletus Smith, a tenant farmer's child from the nearby countryside. The Smiths and their nearest neighbors, the Wilsons, are best friends until Lloyd Wilson falls in love with Fern Smith, Cletus's mother. Their passion and the fatal series of events it precipitates change Cletus's life irreversibly. His previously secure and seemingly timeless life dissolves forever, like the narrator's, into what the narrator describes as "shipwreck." So Long, See You Tomorrow constitutes a kind of apology from the now-elderly narrator to Cletus, a belated attempt to offer his former friend the sympathy that, as a child, he had felt but never expressed. "The one possibility of my making some connection with him seems to lie not in the present but in the past" (p. 56), the narrator says. The entire novel can be read as an exploration of this psychological dilemma and its implications for storytelling and for literature.
William Maxwell was born in 1908 in
Lincoln, Illinois, a town he has
returned to again and again in his
fiction, including So Long, See
You Tomorrow. His mother died
during the influenza epidemic of
1918; his father remarried, and four
years later the family moved to
Chicago. Maxwell attended the
University of Illinois and did
graduate work at Harvard, then spent
some time teaching before turning
permanently to a writing career
which has produced six novels, three
collections of short stories, a
memoir, a collection of essays, and
a children's book. |
"I must admit I discovered his work
late in my own writing career, long
after I began to publish. But upon
reading Maxwell’s beautiful novel,
SO LONG, SEE YOU TOMORROW , his
fables, THE OLD MAN AT THE RAILROAD
CROSSING AND OTHER TALES, and his
collected stories, ALL THE DAYS AND
NIGHTS, I discovered how much I
still had to learn."
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Beethovenstraat 32 |
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