Romance in Marseille named one of 10 best books of 2020

Buried in the archive for nearly ninety years, Professor Maxwell's edition helps to breathe new life into Harlem Renaissance literature.

Prof. Bill Maxwell edited and introduced, with Gary Holcomb, the first-ever edition of Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille, a lost novel of physical disability, the Harlem Renaissance abroad, and the meaning of reparations written in the late 1920s and released by Penguin Classics in 2020. Reviewed in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The New York Review of Books, among other publications, Romance was named a New York Times book of the week, an Editors’ Choice Pick of The New York Times Book Review, and one of the ten best books of 2020 by New York Magazine. Beginning in 2021, Maxwell will serve as the president of the international Modernist Studies Association (MSA). He has begun work on a new book of his own, James Baldwinism Now, examining the effects and lessons of the Baldwin revival in the 21st century.