Billie Dyer and Other Stories

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Through seven wonderfully moving stories, William Maxwell revisits his native town of Lincoln, Illinois, in the early 1900s and considers some of its inhabitants who have, through the years, remained haunting figures to him. In the foreground, brought wholly alive, are relatives, neighbors, and family friends eccentric and otherwise.
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Overview

Through seven wonderfully moving stories, William Maxwell revisits his native town of Lincoln, Illinois, in the early 1900s and considers some of its inhabitants who have, through the years, remained haunting figures to him. In the foreground, brought wholly alive, are relatives, neighbors, and family friends eccentric and otherwise.
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Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
In these seven beautiful tales, set in his small-town Illinois birthplace, Maxwell enriches his graceful prose with affecting candor and poignancy. (Feb.)
Library Journal
In these seven interrelated stories, a mature narrator reminisces about his boyhood days in Lincoln, Illinois--an ``Earthly Paradise'' with tree-lined streets and gentle, ever-affectionate teachers. But elm blight reduces the town to nakedness, tuberculosis kills young women at the age of 23, and the innocent boy learns that prejudice, cruelty, and evil are indigenous even to the first town named after the Great Emancipator. The title story--about one of the town's ``most distinguished'' citizens who yet remains nearly anonymous because of his black skin--rambles and suffers perhaps from excessive details about the Great War. Other stories like ``With Reference to an Incident at a Bridge'' and ``The Holy Terror'' are carefully honed and lead gently but unerringly to epiphanies worthy of James Joyce.-- Albert E. Wilhelm, Tennessee Technological Univ., Cookeville
Kirkus Reviews
From a writer whose career has now spanned almost 60 years comes a volume of breathtakingly perfected and lovely stories that have most of the past century for their grazing land. Maxwell's first fiction since the novel So Long, See You Tomorrow (American Book Award, 1980). Nothing that Maxwell touches upon in these far-back reminiscences is ever bruised or forced as the author, again and again, patiently and delicately draws forth moments of recognition and quiet epiphany from the distant past. "Billie Dyer" is the historian-author's tale of a black man from a poor family in turn- of-the-century Lincoln, Illinois, who went on to become an influential medical doctor. Himself born in Lincoln in 1908, Maxwell can devote four pages to the death of a beloved fifth-grade teacher ("Love") without the faintest whisper of sentimentality, and in another five pages find a life's-worth of self-recognition in a simple childhood moment of moral failure ("With Reference to an Incident at a Bridge"). Longer pieces roam into their material and bring alive the daily life of a lost century, as in a story of a ne'er-do-well uncle ("The Man in the Moon"); through subtle biographies of townspeople told on the occasion of a death ("My Father's Friends"); in a study of race, class, and family history ("The Front and the Back Parts of the House"); or in the passionately quiet tale of a brother losing a leg in a childhood accident ("The Holy Terror"). "As the details unfolded before my mind," writes Maxwell at one point, "I went on putting them down, trusting that there was a story and that I would eventually find it." He finds it again and again, with delicacy, intelligence, and piercing beauty, in fictionthat draws stories forth from the reality of life instead of imposing them on it. Treasurable small masterworks of American literature.
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780816155729
  • Publisher: Cengage Gale
  • Publication date: 7/28/1993
  • Edition description: LARGEPRINT
  • Pages: 187
  • Product dimensions: 6.13 (w) x 9.21 (h) x 0.41 (d)

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