Burkhardt, Barbara

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Burkhardt, Barbara

(Barbara A. Burkhardt)

PERSONAL: Female. Education: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, B.A., 1984, Ph.D., 1994; University of Illinois at Springfield, M.A., 1990.

ADDRESSES: Office—English Program, University of Illinois at Springfield, One University Plaza, Springfield, IL 62703. E-mail—bburk1@uis.edu.

CAREER: Writer and educator. University of Illinois at Springfield, Springfield, adjunct professor 1992–95; assistant professor of English, 1995–.

AWARDS, HONORS: Robert Hacke Scholar-Teacher Award, College English Association; Writer of the Year Award, Lincoln, IL, Library, Choice reccomendation, and Chicago Tribune Best of 2005 selection, all for William Maxwell: A Literary Life; honorary D.H.L., Lincoln College.

WRITINGS:

William Maxwell: A Literary Life, University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 2005.

Contributor of reviews to San Francisco Chronicle, Illinois Issues, and MidAmerica. Author of pamphlet, "From the Illinois Prairie to The New Yorker: The Life and Work of William Maxwell." Contributor to The Dictionary of Midwestern Literature, Indiana University Press, 2001.

SIDELIGHTS: Barbara Burkhardt is an assistant professor of English who specializes in American literature. She had a close personal and professional relationship with William Maxwell, famed former editor of the New Yorker, and during the last ten years of Maxwell's life, she organized his correspondence for the Maxwell archive and conducted extensive interviews with him. The interviews dealt with his forty years as editor of the New Yorker and his relationships with various authors published by that magazine, including Eudora Welty, J.D. Salinger, John Updike, John Cheever, Mary McCarthy, and Vladimir Nabokov. In 2005 Burkhardt published William Maxwell: A Literary Life, an appreciation and biography of the editor, who also wrote short stories and novels, such as So Long, See You Tomorrow. As Burkhardt noted on ALiteraryLife.com, "I hope that the book helps illuminate and interpret the patterns in Maxwell's literature. I try to examine his evolving approach to fiction writing and convey the rich experience of reading his work."

Reviewing William Maxwell in Library Journal, Robert Kelly noted Burkhardt's use of a variety of sources, from personal interviews with Maxwell and his friends and associates, to his correspondence. For Kelly, the subsequent work was "at once [a] scholarly and personal study." Similarly, Booklist contributor Brad Hooper, found William Maxwell to be a "solid book" that is part biography and part a critical evaluation of Maxwell as editor and author. Writing in the Washington Post Book World, Chris Lehmann felt that "Burkhardt gives full and perceptive attention to Maxwell's unique stature as a writer firmly rooted in his upper Midwest homeland." Lehmann concluded that the book "very capably opens discussion of a long-overlooked writer, and sheds much useful light on his coming-of-intellectual-age."