The Happiness of Getting It Down Right: Letters of Frank O'Connor and William Maxwell, 1945-1966

This intimate and detailed record of the relationship--at first professional and then personal as well--between an author, the great Irish short story writer Frank O'Connor, and an editor, William Maxwell of the New Yorker, is a moving and illuminating celebration of a unique friendship and of a time when the writing and the publication of short fiction was an art to be taken seriously. The letters deal primarily with technical problems of individual stories but also with the private lives of both men and the different literary worlds they inhabited. An interesting twist comes when the roles are reversed and O'Connor (whose real name was Michael O'Donovan) helps Maxwell whip his own unwieldy novel, The Chateau, into shape. The editing and annotation of the letters by Steinman, an associate professor of English at Nassau Community College in New York who has written extensively about O'Connor and other Irish writers, is unobtrusive. The postscript includes brief essays on the letter writers' families and an essay by Maxwell, ""Frank O'Connor and the New Yorker."" In 1952, O'Connor wrote in the Herald-Tribune: ""I am endlessly happy writing stories, and editors who must deal with me as a storyteller find me angelic."" He was joking, of course, but in this case he also seems to have been right. Photos not seen by PW. (May)