The differences among the promotional synopses of this book’s various editions are super interesting and say as much about the culture of their times as the book itself.

All are technically true descriptions (if affording varying degrees of marketing effectiveness). Yet the last is frankly misleading, in that Martha is not the main or viewpoint character of the book. Her husband Austin is. Why the book’s more modern marketers made that shift in emphasis is left as an exercise to the reader.

First Edition, 1948

Taking a certain elm-shaded street in a small Middle Western town—a street whose houses appear at the present day to have shrunk in size and dignity—William Maxwell has carefully and ironically restored the trumpet vines, the red geraniums, the hanging fern baskets, and the people who of a summer evening sat on their porches, watching the fireflies and the children playing Run, Sheep, Run.

Against this common memory, the author has projected a sensitive story about a man who has to choose, and cannot choose, between a young, idealistic girl whom he in merely anxious to help and his wife whom he loves. The dilemma that dogs his footsteps—why what he tries to do for one person too often works against what he is trying to do for someone else—Austin King does not at first recognize. He comes to understand finally when he is driven into a corner by the girl’s family, pseudo-Southerners with a gift for making friends and creating trouble wherever they go.

Time Will Darken It is both a thoughtful, realistic novel and a comedy of misused and abused hospitality. There is distinction in the writing of every sentence, and sympathy as well as concern for the deeper motives which misdirect the actions of morally ambitious people.

Vintage Reissue, 1997

When Austin King plays host to his distant Southern kinfolk, he unwittingly sets in motion events that will threaten his marriage, his law practice, and his standing in the community. For Austin’s eagerness to please his idealistic foster cousin, Nora, is all too easily mistaken for other motives—especially since Nora is all too obviously besotted with him. This book is further evidence that Maxwell is one of our national treasures.

EPUB Reissue, 2009

Pregnant with her second child, Martha King finds her marriage to lawyer Austin King more and more frustrating when her husband befriends his young foster cousin, Nora, and, in the process, unwittingly jeopardizes his marriage, career, and place in the community.