Jean Stafford
| Columbia Encyclopedia: Jean Stafford |
Stafford, Jean, 1915-79, American writer, b. Covina, Calif., grad. Univ. of Colorado, 1936. Her literary reputation rests primarily on her exquisitely wrought short stories. Both these and her novels focus on lonely, isolated characters, usually adolescents, whom she depicts with gentle irony. Her works include the novels Boston Adventure (1944), The Mountain Lion (1948), and The Catherine Wheel (1952) and her Collected Stories (1969; Pulitzer Prize). She was married to Robert Lowell.
| Works: Works by Jean Stafford |
(1915-1979)
| 1944 | Boston Adventure. Stafford's first novel concerns the relationship between a foreign-born companion and a wealthy Boston woman. Stafford, born in California and raised in Colorado, was married to poet Robert Lowell from 1940 to 1948. |
| 1947 | The Mountain Lion. Stafford's second novel concerns the relationship between a brother and a sister in rural Colorado, in a deftly constructed work with psychological and symbolic implications. |
| 1952 | The Catherine Wheel. Stafford's third and final novel traces the emotional paralysis of a female protagonist who is in love with the man who marries her cousin. Her most ambitious and technically challenging work, the novel gains only mixed reviews. |
| 1953 | Children Are Bored on Sunday. Stafford's first story collection helps establish her as one of the modern masters of the short form. It would be followed by one other volume--Bad Characters (1966)--before her Collected Stories (1969). |
| 1969 | Collected Stories. Stafford's story collection wins the Pulitzer Prize and prompts a recognition of the writer as one of the modern masters of the short story form. |
| Wikipedia: Jean Stafford |
Jean Stafford (July 1, 1915 – March 26, 1979) was an American short story writer and novelist, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford in 1970.
She was born in California. Her first novel, Boston Adventure was a best-seller, earning her national acclaim. She wrote two more novels in her career, but her greatest medium was the short story: her works were published in The New Yorker and various literary magazines.
Stafford's personal life was often marked by unhappiness. Her first marriage, to the brilliant but mentally unstable poet Robert Lowell, left her with lingering emotional and physical scars. She was seriously injured in an automobile accident with Lowell at the wheel, a trauma she described in one of her best-known stories, "The Interior Castle," and the disfigurement she suffered as a result was a turning point in her life. A second marriage to Life magazine photographer Oliver Jensen also ended in divorce. Stafford enjoyed a brief period of domestic happiness with her third husband, A. J. Liebling, a prominent writer for The New Yorker. After his death, she virtually ceased writing fiction.
For many years Stafford suffered from alcoholism, depression, and pulmonary disease. By age sixty-three she had almost stopped eating and died of cardiac arrest in White Plains, New York in 1979. She was buried in Green River Cemetery, East Hampton, New York.
Several biographies of Jean Stafford were written following her death: David Roberts' Jean Stafford, a Biography (1988), Charlotte Margolis Goodman's Jean Stafford: The Savage Heart (1990), and Ann Hulbert's The Interior Castle: The Art and Life of Jean Stafford (1992). Among these, Goodman's deals most successfully with Stafford as a proto-feminist writer.
Bibliography
- Boston Adventure (1944)
- The Interior Castle (1947, short story)
- The Mountain Lion (1947)
- The Catherine Wheel (1952)
- Collected Stories (1969)
External links
- Jean Stafford at Internet Accuracy Project
- Jean Stafford at Find a Grave
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 | Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/. Read more |
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| Works. The Chronology of American Literature, edited by Daniel S. Burt. Copyright © 2004 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more |
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Mentioned in
- In the Zoo (Further Reading) (story)
- In the Zoo (Critical Overview) (story)
- In the Zoo (story)
- Robert Lowell (American poet)
- In the Zoo (Author Biography) (story)
- The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket (Author Biography) (poem)
- For the Union Dead (Author Biography) (poem)
- In the Zoo (Themes) (story)
- The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford
- Imaginary Friends (Characters) (play)
- In the Zoo (Criticism) (story)
- Collected Stories
- American literature (literature, United States)
- PRIZES AND AWARDS: Pulitzer Prizes (1917–2000)
