Shirley was furious, but the disappointment had been overshadowed even before it happened by a letter from The New Yorker, this time an acceptance. It is not clear whether she had revised those first rejected stories or if this was new work. Either way, she now knew someone on the inside, which changed everything. The previous month, just as he had done the year before with Arturo Vivante, Dwight Macdonald had offered to take one of her stories to the magazine, which meant that it would circumvent the slush pile and go straight to William Maxwell. Maxwell was legendary, by many accounts the most significant editor of short fiction in the United States through the postwar decades; he had worked with J. D. Salinger, Vladimir Nabokov, John Cheever, Mavis Gallant, and Eudora Welty. In a memoir of his friendship with Maxwell, Alec Wilkinson wrote that Maxwell brought to the work of editing “a selfless interest in encouraging talent, and an intimacy with the catalog of technical possibility” and that he simply took pleasure in good writing. The writers Maxwell worked with were “on the whole so accomplished that his position also involved taking delight in what they brought into being.” He was “extremely receptive to women writers,” and his relationship with Shirley in the years that followed was “golden,” a “meeting of minds.” With a devotion—what Wilkinson described as “a near spiritual hunger”—for literature that echoed her own, William Maxwell was surely Shirley’s ideal first reader.