The authorized name by which the Library of Congress catalogues him — "Perkins, Maxwell E. (Maxwell Evarts), 1884–1947" — captures in its dry archival form the full span of a career devoted entirely to the shaping of other people's prose. That catalogue entry is, in its way, the single most telling document associated with Maxwell Perkins: an editor so committed to the work of others that the record of his own existence is most cleanly expressed as a set of dates and an institutional label.

William Maxwell Evarts Perkins was born on September 20, 1884, in New York City. He was educated at Harvard University, where he passed through Harvard College before beginning the professional life that would define him. He worked as a book editor and literary editor, occupying a role that placed him squarely between the manuscript and the reading public. He was also identified, in some records, as a publisher and as a novelist, though his energies were directed above all toward the editorial function — the patient, sustained work of reading, advising, and bringing texts to completion.

His career unfolded in the English language, and his citizenship was American throughout. The facts of his daily labor were largely invisible by design: an editor's name does not appear on the title page, and Perkins seems to have understood that arrangement as the proper condition of the work. He moved through the publishing world as someone whose influence was exercised in correspondence, in margin notes, and in conversation — none of which survives in the standard biographical record as a headline event, but which constituted the substance of his professional life.

Perkins died on June 17, 1947, in Stamford. The Library of Congress authority record that bears his name — "Perkins, Maxwell E. (Maxwell Evarts), 1884–1947" — remains the most precise and durable monument to a man who spent his working life ensuring that the names appearing above his own on any given book would be the ones posterity remembered.