Author Biography
Genius Baby is William Maxwell's first work of fiction. The ideas that form the bases of this story come from his living experiences in rural Arkansas where he was delivered by a midwife, who was intelligent enough to turn out the lights so that he was not blinded at birth; growing up in the desert of multi-cultural Arizona, and teaching and researching in the world's most diverse cultures, Korea, Nigeria, Fiji, and from having studied under some of the world's best minds at Oregon State, California, Oxford, and Harvard universities. The characters who make up the story may resemble heroes from the hundreds of science fiction stories he read as a high school student or the villains from a forgotten spy movie; their reality is archetypal but also nebulous. William Maxwell's most significant research studies include The Planning and Establishment of a Model Child Development Center in North Carolina which took the form of his doctoral project at Harvard; and his studies of how to raise the IQ's of six-year old children in Fiji. Those latter studies typically involved experienced teachers from the eleven nations then served by the University of the South Pacific experimenting with diverse methods in classrooms in the Suva, Fiji, area. The methods were nominated by the experienced teachers who typically had been teaching for twelve years and were returning to the University for advanced certification. The methods typically included mathematics tutoring, reading tutoring, medical checkups, excursions, playing various intellectual games, paper folding (or origami), novel musical experiences, and the like. The study repeated for four years established the fact that children's IQ scores as measured by typical IQ tests can be raised by as much as 19 points in a semester. The results were published in refereed journals in Britain and America and in a major academic book, Thinking: The Expanding Frontier. Philadelphia: Franklin Institute Press (1983), now owned by Lawrence E. Erlbaum, Publishers.
