Birthday profile

William Keepers Maxwell Jr.

William Keepers Maxwell, Jr., American editor, novelist, short story writer, and essayist (died 2000)

Born
August 16, 1908
Died
July 31, 2000
Zodiac sign
Leo
Birth year
1908

About William Keepers Maxwell Jr.

William Keepers Maxwell Jr. was an American editor, novelist, short story writer, essayist, children's author, and memoirist. He served as a fiction editor at The New Yorker from 1936 to 1975. An editor devoted to his writers, Maxwell became a mentor and confidant to many authors. Maxwell was best known for being a fiction editor of The New Yorker magazine for thirty-nine years (1936–1975), where he worked with writers such as Sylvia Townsend Warner, Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, J.

Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.

The world when William Keepers Maxwell Jr. was born

William Keepers Maxwell Jr. was born in 1908. The year snapshot below places that birthday in its cultural and historical setting: the music and films people were following, the headlines shaping public life, and the everyday prices families encountered.

Culture in 1908

  • Best-selling book"Mr. Crewe's Career" – Winston Churchill

Headlines and milestones

  • Major sports momentChicago Cubs win World Series
  • Top headlineFord Model T goes on sale — $850
  • Technology milestoneFord Model T — affordable automobile for the masses
  • Defining fadAutomobile craze
  • World population~1.68B

United States snapshot

  • U.S. leaderTheodore Roosevelt
  • U.S. population87.4M

1908 versus 2026

These figures put everyday life in William Keepers Maxwell Jr.'s birth year beside the site's latest United States snapshot.

Measure19082026
Population87.4M341 million

Sources and editorial standards

This profile combines a biographical source with structured birthday and historical context. Sources recorded for this profile: Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Library of Congress, Wikidata. See our editorial policy for sourcing, corrections, and review standards.

Read the source biography on Wikipedia. Wikipedia text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.