The Folded Leaf

From the National Book Award-winning author of So Long, See You Tomorrow comes a poignant novel about the innocence of childhood and the unspoken bonds of friendship.

"A subtle, sensitive, beautifully written story." —Time

Set in Illinois in the 1920s, William Maxwell's serenely observed yet deeply affecting novel traces the evolution of the unusual bond between two very different boys. Lymie Peters is thin, flat-chested, inept at sports, and a straight-A student. Spud Latham is an extrovert, physically everything that Lymie would like to be, with a streak of the unruly in his nature. Their friendship, which they do not think about but merely accept the way they accept the fact that one day follows another, lasts through high school and into college--until Spud falls in love. When he mistakes the girl's fondness for Lymie and Lymie's for her for something more, his distrust is impenetrable. And although the resulting rift is in part Lymie's doing, it proves to be more than he can bear.

With the keen eye for emotional nuance for which Maxwell is renowned, The Folded Leaf lays bare the heartbreaking aftermath of devotion and betrayal and the momentous passage from adolescence to adulhood.

William Maxwell was born in 1908, in Lincoln, Illinois. When he was fourteen his family moved to Chicago and he continues his education there and at the University of Illinois. After a year of graduate work at Harvard he went back to Urbana and taught freshman composition, and then turned to writing. He has published six novels, three collections of literary essays and reviews, and a book for children. For forty years he was a fiction editor at The New Yorker. From 1969 to 1972 he was president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, He received the Brandeis Creative Arts Award Medal and, for So Long, See You Tomorrow, the National Book Award and the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in 2000.