The Element of Lavishness

An instant classic in the literature of friendship: the witty, affectionate 40-year correspondence between a great story-writer and her editor . . . pleasure and delight.

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.Sylvia Townsend Warner was a poet, short-story writer, and novelist, as well as an authority on early English music and a member of the Communist Party. Her first novel, Lolly Willowes, appeared in 1926 and was the first ever Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Mr. Fortune’s Maggot, her second, followed a year later. The Salutation was the title novella of a 1932 collection. Over the course of her long career, Sylvia Townsend Warner published five more novels, seven books of poetry, a translation of Proust, fourteen volumes of short stories, and a biography of T.H. White.

William Keepers Maxwell Jr. was an American editor, novelist, short story writer, essayist, children's author, and memoirist. He served as a fiction editor at The New Yorker from 1936 to 1975.