The Outermost Dream: Literary Sketches

The Outermost Dream brings together essays and reviews by William Maxwell, one of America's foremost writers and editors. Maxwell chose deliberately to focus on biography, memoir, diaries, and correspondence when reviewing books: "what people said and did and wore and ate and hoped for and were afraid of, and in detail after often unimaginable detail they refresh our idea of existence and hold oblivion at arm's length." In reading his reviews, we are struck by Maxwell's skill in choosing the one particular, the haunting moment, that further illuminates our understanding of the power of an individual life. His discernment is equally telling whether writing about literary luminaries such as Virginia Woolf, Lord Byron, E.B. White, Isak Dinesen, or delving into the diaries of an unknown Victorian curate with vivid dreams of murder and mayhem.