William Keepers Maxwell, Jr. was an American novelist and editor. Maxwell was born in Lincoln, Illinois, and attended the University of Illinois and Harvard University. He was best known as the fiction editor of The New Yorker magazine for forty years (1936-1975), where he worked with writers such as Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, J.D. Salinger, John Cheever, Mavis Gallant, Frank O'Connor, Larry Woiwode, John O'Hara, Eudora Welty, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. As an editor Welty wrote of him: "For fiction writers, he was the headquarters."