| Jean Stafford | |
| Birth Date: | 1 July 1915 |
| Birth Place: | Covina, California, U.S. |
| Death Place: | White Plains, New York, U.S. |
| Occupation: | Novelist, short story writer |
| Genre: | Literary fiction |
| Education: | University of Colorado, Boulder (BA, MA) |
| Notableworks: | The Mountain Lion, The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford |
| Spouse: | Robert Lowell Oliver Jensen A. J. Liebling |
Jean Stafford (July 1, 1915 – March 26, 1979) was an American short story writer and novelist. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford in 1970.[1] [2]
She was born in Covina, California, to Mary Ethel (McKillop) and John Richard Stafford, a Western pulp writer. As a youth Stafford attended the University of Colorado Boulder and, with friend James Robert Hightower, won a one-year fellowship to study philology at the University of Heidelberg from 1936 to 1937.
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. In 1955 she won first place in the O. Henry Awards for her story "In the Zoo". For the academic year 1964–1965, she was a Fellow on the faculty at the Center for Advanced Studies of Wesleyan University.[3]
Stafford's personal life was often marked by unhappiness. She was married three times. Her first marriage, to the brilliant but mentally unstable poet Robert Lowell in 1940, left her with lingering emotional and physical scars. She was seriously injured in an automobile accident with Lowell at the wheel in 1938, 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 staff writer 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 in 1963, she nearly stopped writing fiction, though she continued to write non-fiction essays.
For many years Stafford suffered from alcoholism,[4] 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.[5] She was buried in Green River Cemetery, East Hampton, New York.
In The Elements of Style, E. B. White cites Stafford as an example of good prose: "Jean Stafford, to cite a modern author, demonstrates in her story 'In the Zoo' how prose is made vivid by the use of words and images that evoke sensations."[6]
Several biographies of Jean Stafford were written following her death, notably 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).
| Title | Publication | Collected in |
|---|---|---|
| "And Lots of Solid Color" | American Prefaces (November 1939) | Collected Stories & Other Writings |
| "The Darkening Moon" | Harper’s Bazaar (January 1944) | The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford |
| "The Lippia Lawn" | The Kenyon Review (Spring 1944) | |
| "A Reunion" | Partisan Review (Fall 1944) | Collected Stories & Other Writings |
| "The Home Front" | Partisan Review (Spring 1945) | Children Are Bored on Sunday |
| "Between the Porch and the Altar" | Harper’s Magazine (June 1945) | |
| "The Captain’s Gift" a.k.a. "The Present" | The Sewanee Review (April 1946) | Bad Characters |
| "The Interior Castle" | Partisan Review (Nov-Dec 1946) | Children Are Bored on Sunday |
| "The Hope Chest" | Harper's Magazine (January 1947) | The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford |
| "A Slight Maneuver" | Mademoiselle (February 1947) | Collected Stories & Other Writings |
| "Children Are Bored on Sunday" | The New Yorker (February 21, 1948) | Children Are Bored on Sunday |
| "The Bleeding Heart" | Partisan Review (September 1948) | |
| "A Summer Day" | The New Yorker (September 11, 1948) | |
| "The Cavalier" | The New Yorker (February 12, 1949) | The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford |
| "A Modest Proposal" a.k.a. "Pax Vobiscum" | The New Yorker (July 23, 1949) | Children Are Bored on Sunday |
| "Polite Conversation" | The New Yorker (August 20, 1949) | The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford |
| "A Country Love Story" | The New Yorker (May 6, 1950) | Children Are Bored on Sunday |
| "The Maiden" | The New Yorker (July 29, 1950) | |
| "Old Flaming Youth" | Harper's Bazaar (December 1950) | Collected Stories & Other Writings |
| "The Echo and the Nemesis" a.k.a. "The Nemesis" | The New Yorker (December 16, 1950) | Children Are Bored on Sunday |
| "The Healthiest Girl in Town" | The New Yorker (April 7, 1951) | The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford |
| "The Violet Rock" | The New Yorker (April 26, 1952) | Collected Stories & Other Writings |
| "I Love Someone" | Colorado Quarterly (Summer 1952) | The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford |
| "Life Is No Abyss" | The Sewanee Review (July 1952) | |
| "The Connoisseurs" | Harper's Bazaar (October 1952) | Collected Stories & Other Writings |
| "Cops and Robbers" a.k.a. "The Shorn Lamb" | The New Yorker (January 24, 1953) | Bad Characters |
| "The Liberation" | The New Yorker (May 30, 1953) | Stories (1956) Bad Characters |
| "In the Zoo" | The New Yorker (September 19, 1953) | |
| "A Winter’s Tale" | New Short Novels (Ballantine, 1954) | Bad Characters |
| "Bad Characters" | The New Yorker (December 4, 1954) | Stories (1956) Bad Characters |
| "Beatrice Trueblood’s Story" | The New Yorker (February 26, 1955) | Stories (1956) |
| "Maggie Meriwether’s Rich Experience" | The New Yorker (June 25, 1955) | |
| "The Warlock" | The New Yorker (December 24, 1955) | Collected Stories & Other Writings |
| "The End of a Career" | The New Yorker (January 21, 1956) | Bad Characters |
| "Caveat Emptor" a.k.a. "The Matchmaker" | Mademoiselle (May 1956) | |
| "A Reading Problem" | The New Yorker (June 30, 1956) | |
| "The Mountain Day" | The New Yorker (August 18, 1956) | The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford |
| "My Blithe, Sad Bird" | The New Yorker (April 6, 1957) | Collected Stories & Other Writings |
| "A Reasonable Facsimile" | The New Yorker (August 3, 1957) | Bad Characters |
| "The Children’s Game" | The Saturday Evening Post (October 4, 1958) | The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford |
| "The Scarlet Letter" | Mademoiselle (July 1959) | Collected Stories & Other Writings |
| "The Tea Time of Stouthearted Ladies" | The Kenyon Review (Winter 1964) | The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford |
| "The Ordeal of Conrad Pardee" | Ladies' Home Journal (July 1964) | Collected Stories & Other Writings |
| "The Philosophy Lesson" | The New Yorker (November 16, 1968) | The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford |
| "An Influx of Poets" | The New Yorker (November 6, 1978) | The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford (Not present in first edition) |
| "Woden’s Day" | Shenandoah (Autumn 1979) | Collected Stories & Other Writings |