The Element of Lavishness

by Warner, Sylvia Townsend; Maxwell, William; Steinman, Michael

• ISBN13: 9781582431185
• ISBN10: 1582431183
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-01-01
• Publisher: Counterpoint

Summary

In July 1938, William Maxwell, then twenty-nine years old and the acting poetry editor of The New Yorker, wrote to Sylvia Townsend Warner inviting her to send him verse. Miss Warner, forty-four and famous for her novel Lolly Willowes, had recently begun writing stories for the magazine, antic, inimitable sketches of English life that Maxwell adored. The poems were sent, and a remarkable friendship was begun.

Author Biography

Sylvia Townsend Warner was born in 1893 at Harrow-on-the-Hill. A largely self-taught musicologist, she was one of the editors of the monumental, ten-volume Tudor Church Music, but her true calling was poetry and fiction. Her first novel, Lolly Willowes (1926), brought her instant recognition and success -- it was the first selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club -- but she is best known for her short stories, some 150 of which were published in The New Yorker between 1936 and 1977. Her works include seven novels, fourteen volumes of stories, a collected poems, and a life of T. H. White. She died in 1978, at the age of eighty-four, in Dorset, England William Maxwell was born in 1908 in Lincoln, Illinois. From 1936 to 1976 he was an editor at The New Yorker, where he collaborated with Warner on most of her short stories. He also edited, at Warner's request, a selection from her letters, published in 1982. His own books include six novels, a collected stories, a remarkable history of his family, and a volume of essays and reviews. Among the many honors his work received are the American Book Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, the Howells Medal and the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Ivan Sandroff Award for Distinguished Service to American Letters from the National Book Critics Circle. He died in August 2000, at the age of ninety-one, in New York City Michael Steinman, Professor of English at Nassau Community College, is the author and editor of several books. He lives with his wife in Melville, New York

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. xv
Letters, 1938-1978	p. 3
Postscript	p. 341
"What You Can't Hang Onto"	p. 343
Index	p. 349
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