William Keepers Maxwell Jr. was an American novelist and fiction editor at The New Yorker. He studied at the University of Illinois and Harvard University. Maxwell wrote six highly acclaimed novels, a number of short stories and essays, children's stories, and a memoir titled Ancestors (1972).

His award-winning fiction, increasingly seen as some of the most important of the 20th Century, often explores themes of childhood, family, loss, and lives quietly and irreparably changed. Much of his work is autobiographical, particularly concerning the loss of his mother when he was 10 years old, growing up in the rural Midwest of America.