Alec
Wilkinson
BenCheever
William Maxwell is widely regarded as one of our country's great writers. His books include The Folded Leaf, They Came Like Swallows, and So Long, See You Tomorrow. He was also a great editor of short fiction. Over a span of forty years at The New Yorker, he worked with J. D. Salinger, Eudora Welty, John Updike, John Cheever, Vladimir Nabokov, Frank O'Connor, and Harold Brodkey, among other writers. He died in July 2000 at ninety-one.
Alec Wilkinson will read from his new book, My Mentor: A Young Man's Friendship with William Maxwell, which is a meditation on their relationship over the past quarter century. Alec Wilkinson became good friends with Maxwell after he decided at age 24 that he wanted to write and his father sent him to Maxwell. Wilkinson is the author of such acclaimed works of literary nonfiction as A Violent Act, Midnight, and Big Sugar, and is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, among other magazines.
Ben Cheever, also a long-time friend of Maxwell, will read one of Maxwell's stories. Cheever has been a reporter and an editor at Reader's Digest, has published three novels, and edited The Letters of John Cheever. His fourth book, Selling Ben Cheever: Back to Square One in a Service Economy, is a dark and funny account of the author's attempt to understand what it must be like to be downsized and to have to start completely over.
Suggested Donation: $5 ($3 for members)
The readings at the HVWC are made possible in part by grants from the Bydale Foundation and the Gannett Foundation; with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts; and by Westchester Arts Council with funds from Westchester County Government, corporations and individuals.