 Maillard was one of 35 writers placed on the West Virginia Literary Map in 2004 and he was inducted that year into the Wheeling, West Virginia, Hall of Fame.In 2004, Maillard returned to the raw Bildungsroman material first published in "The Knife in My Hands" and "Cutting Through" and rewrote and reshaped it into the "Difficulty at the Beginning" quartet, which appeared in four volumes between September 2005 and September 2006.The Toronto "The Globe and Mail" selected "Difficulty at the Beginning" as one of the top books of 2006, calling it "a work of terrible beauty and grace, a masterpiece fit to contend with the best novels of the last century."