So Long, See You Tomorrow is inspired by Maxwell’s childhood experiences in Lincoln, Illinois. The town is named after Abraham Lincoln, who practiced law there before running for president. During the author’s childhood, Lincoln was a farming community with a small commercial sector. The family lived there until Maxwell’s early high school years when they relocated to Chicago.

Illinois is a recurring setting throughout Maxwell’s fiction and, despite living most of his adult life in New York, he is an essential Midwestern writer. Many of the events, settings, and characters in So Long, See You Tomorrow—including the central murder—are drawn from real life. Numerous names, dates, and locations are unchanged. The narrator is a barely fictional proxy for Maxwell and shares key biographical details with the author, elaborated in Barbara Burkhardt’s biography William Maxwell: A Literary Life (University of Illinois Press, 2005).

Maxwell’s mother died in an influenza epidemic two days after giving birth to his younger brother. This loss defined his childhood and shaped his life. His grieving father (an insurance salesman) paced around the house, followed by his sons. His father later remarried a woman named Grace McGrath whose jocular brothers befriended him.