From the National Book Award-winning author of So Long, See You Tomorrow comes an astonishing evocation of a vanished world, a book built from letters and journals, memory and speculation, and infused on every page with the vivid intimacy of a great novel. "Maxwell's sensitive prose is the good and careful tool of an artist who is always doing exactly what he means to do." —Eudora Welty Ancestors is the history of William Maxwell's family, which he retraces branch by branch across the wilderness, farms, and small towns of the nineteenth-century Midwest. He takes his readers into the lives of settlers, itinerant preachers, and small businessmen, and makes us understand the way they saw their world and the way they imagined the world to come. With the same precision and empathy he brought to his award-winning novels, Maxwell has transformed the family history into a rare and luminous work of the literary imagination.