The Folded Leaf - (Vintage International) by William Maxwell (Paperback)

About the Book

Here is a classic novel from one of our most honored writers--the author of such acclaimed works as So Long, See You Tomorrow and All the Days and Nights". The Folded Leaf is the serenely observed yet deeply moving story of two boys finding one another in the Midwest of the 1920s, when childhood lasted longer than it does today and even adults were more innocent of what life could bring.

Book Synopsis

From the National Book Award-winning author of So Long, See You Tomorrow comes a poignant novel about the innocence of childhood and the unspoken bonds of friendship.

"A subtle, sensitive, beautifully written story." --Time

Set in Illinois in the 1920s, William Maxwell's serenely observed yet deeply affecting novel traces the evolution of the unusual bond between two very different boys. Lymie Peters is thin, flat-chested, inept at sports, and a straight-A student. Spud Latham is an extrovert, physically everything that Lymie would like to be, with a streak of the unruly in his nature. Their friendship, which they do not think about but merely accept the way they accept the fact that one day follows another, lasts through high school and into college--until Spud falls in love. When he mistakes the girl's fondness for Lymie and Lymie's for her for something more, his distrust is impenetrable. And although the resulting rift is in part Lymie's doing, it proves to be more than he can bear.

With the keen eye for emotional nuance for which Maxwell is renowned, The Folded Leaf lays bare the heartbreaking aftermath of devotion and betrayal and the momentous passage from adolescence to adulhood.

Review Quotes

"A true, beautiful and profoundly poignant novel. It is so good it almost seems miraculous. . . . The Fold Leaf is a novel of such discernment, such mature judgment and such compassion, it seems to illuminate every subject on which it touches." --The New York Times

"A quite unconventional novel . . . very much lived and very much seen . . . moving and absorbing." --Edmund Wilson

"[Maxwell's] characters are so well drawn you want to know more and more about them. His writing is simple and direct, poignant without being sentimental." --Houston Post

About the Author

William Maxwell was born in 1908, in Lincoln, Illinois. When he was fourteen his family moved to Chicago and he continues his education there and at the University of Illinois. After a year of graduate work at Harvard he went back to Urbana and taught freshman composition, and then turned to writing. He has published six novels, three collections of literary essays and reviews, and a book for children. For forty years he was a fiction editor at The New Yorker. From 1969 to 1972 he was president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, He received the Brandeis Creative Arts Award Medal and, for So Long, See You Tomorrow, the National Book Award and the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in 2000.