Billie Dyer and Other Stories (Plume Contemporary Fiction) [Mass Market Paperback]

William Maxwell (Author)

Book Description

Series: Plume Contemporary Fiction | Publication Date: January 1, 1995

Revives characters from the author's youth in Lincoln, Illinois, in the early 1900s in seven stories featuring a successful black surgeon, a sexy elementary school teacher, a rebellious young child, and others. 12,500 first printing.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In these seven beautiful tales, set in his small-town Illinois birthplace, Maxwell enriches his graceful prose with affecting candor and poignancy.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From 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
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: Plume; 2nd edition (January 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0452269504
• ISBN-13: 978-0452269507
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,454,880 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An enjoyable memoir, April 27, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Billie Dyer and Other Stories (Paperback)

I was impressed at how well the seven pieces that comprise this book, reminiscences of the author's boyhood in Lincoln, Illinois in the early twentieth century, hang together to create an almost novelistic sweep, a whole that's greater than the sum of its parts. They were originally published as separate pieces, mostly in "The New Yorker", but I wonder whether the author had this collection in mind from the start.

The labeling of this book as fiction puzzles me. As far as I can tell from internal evidence, it's acually a non-fictional memoir. An introduction by the author would have been welcome.

Fans of William Maxwell's fiction interested in learning about the author's background will find this book very enjoyable.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stories Recalled in Tranquility, July 30, 2001

By 

H. F. Corbin "Foster Corbin" (ATLANTA, GA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Billie Dyer And Other Stories (Hardcover)

There are a total of seven stories here, all gems. They are recollections of Mr. Maxwell's Lincoln, Illinois. Published in 1992 when the writer was 84 years old, these beautiful stories possess a nostalgic, almost elegiac quality as Mr. Maxwell remembers friends and family members long dead. We meet Miss Vera Brown, Maxwell's beloved fifth grade teacher who dies of tuberculosis at twenty-three and Billie Dyer, a local Black lad who became a doctor, among others.

In "With Reference to an Incident at a Bridge" for Eudora Welty, Maxwell's longtime friend, he recounts a childhood prank that teaches him never again to be taken totally by surprise by cruelty, in this instance his and the other boys'own. My favorite story is "The Man in the Moon." The title refers to a picture of Maxwell's Uncle Ted, a handsome and carefree young man, and an unnamed young woman posing on a crescent moon in a photographer's studio. Uncle Ted was one of those folks with good looks and brains-- we have all known someone like him-- who never get their lives together. This story contains a wealth of wisdom. Mr. Maxwell says it far better than I can paraphrase. About Ted's luck, the writer says "Looking back on my uncle's life, it seems to me to have been a mixture of having to lie in the bed he had made and the most terrible, undeserved, outrageous misfortune. About Ted's death: "He must have been in his early sixties when he got pneumonia. He didn't put up much of a fight against it. Edna (his wife) believed that he willed himself to die." Finally on old age: "The view after seventy is breathtaking. What is lacking is someone, anyone, of the older generation to whom you can turn when you want to satisfy your curiosity about some detail of the landscape of the past. There is no longer any older generation. You have become it, while your mind was mostly on other matters."

For forty years Mr. Maxwell was a fiction editor at THE NEW YORKER and published a relatively small number of novels and short stories for one who lived into his nineties. I'm sure we will never know, however, how much readers have been enriched by this master's pruning of other writers' unwieldly prose.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Histories of Not-Quite-Forgotten People, September 23, 2005

By 

Scott N. Stone (Washington,, DC USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Billie Dyer And Other Stories (Hardcover)

For all that Maxwell's prose is beautiful and evocative, his approach is meticulous and his viewpoint almost clinical. What fascinates him most is that, unlike the big events recorded in newspapers and histories, the stories of ordinary people are recorded mainly in the memories of living persons. Those memories are not only ephemeral, but mutable and prone to editing and embellishment. Great family deeds are magnified; misdeeds are forgotten and their perpetrators and their histories (good and bad) shunned. The most poignant moment comes in Man in the Moon when the narrator, who had known his black sheep uncle mainly through the disparaging comments of his family, decides to visit him, and comes to see in him a core of goodness and dignity.