Jean Stafford
Jean Stafford | |
|---|---|
Stafford in 1941 | |
| Born | July 1, 1915 Covina, California, U.S. |
| Died | March 26, 1979 (aged 63) White Plains, New York, U.S. |
| Occupation | Novelist, short story writer |
| Education | University of Colorado Boulder (BA, MA) |
| Genre | Literary fiction |
| Notable works | |
| Spouse |
|
Jean Stafford (July 1, 1915 – March 26, 1979)[1][2] was an American short story writer and novelist. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford in 1970.
Early life and education
Stafford was born in Covina, California,[1][2] the fourth child of Mary Ethel (McKillop) and John Richard Stafford, who owned a walnut ranch. The family moved in 1920 to San Diego and after her father was ruined in the stock market, to Colorado, where he was a largely unsuccessful writer and his wife ran a boarding house.[3] Stafford's second novel, The Mountain Lion (1947), draws on her childhood in Colorado.[4] She earned bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Colorado Boulder in 1936,[1][3] and then studied for a year at the University of Heidelberg on a fellowship.[1][3] Later in the 1930s she was briefly enrolled in graduate school at the University of Iowa.[3]
Career
After returning to the United States, Stafford worked as assistant to the director of the summer writing conference at the University of Colorado, Boulder, then taught English for a year at Stephens College before moving to Massachusetts, where she eventually settled in Concord to concentrate on writing.[3]
Her first novel, Boston Adventure (1944), was a best-seller.[1][4][5] With the proceeds she was able to buy a house in Damariscotta Mills, Maine.[3] She wrote two more novels,[6] but became better known for her short stories, many of which were published in The New Yorker.
Stafford also published many book reviews.[4] She served as secretary of The Southern Review while living in Baton Rouge with her first husband,[3] and for the academic year 1964–1965 was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies of Wesleyan University.[7]
Honors
Stafford was awarded a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1945 and was twice awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in fiction, in 1945 and 1948.[3] She won seven O Henry Awards for her short stories,[5] and in 1970 The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.[2][3][4] She was made a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.[3]
Personal life and death
Stafford lived briefly with the Sinologist James Hightower, a college friend in both Boulder and Heidelberg, before dating the poet Robert Lowell, whom she had also met in Boulder. In 1938 she suffered serious spinal and facial injuries in a car accident with Lowell at the wheel; she drew on the trauma in her story "The Interior Castle", and sued Lowell for her medical expenses.[3] She nonetheless married him in April 1940;[3][5] the marriage ended in divorce in 1948.[4] A second marriage to Life magazine staff writer Oliver Jensen in 1950 also ended in divorce, in 1953.[3] In 1959 she remarried to A. J. Liebling, a prominent writer for The New Yorker. Their marriage was happy, but ended with his death in 1963.[4] She continued to live in their house on Long Island, New York, and to write primarily non-fiction, including an interview-based portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald's mother, A Mother in History, published in 1966.[2][3]
For much of her life she suffered from alcoholism[4][8] and depression.[6] She was hospitalized at Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic for almost a year in the late 1940s.[3] She had a stroke in 1976 and developed emphysema;[3] she died in a clinic in White Plains, New York, in 1979, at the age of 63.[1][2] Her ashes were placed with Liebling's in Green River Cemetery in East Hampton.[2]
Legacy
The Library of America republished Stafford's fiction in 2019 and 2021.[6][5]
Several biographies of Jean Stafford were written following her death, including 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).
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."[9]
Works
Novels
- Boston Adventure, 1944
- The Mountain Lion, 1947
- The Catherine Wheel, 1952
Short story collections
- Children Are Bored on Sunday, 1953, includes "The Interior Castle" (1946)
- A Book of Stories, with John Cheever, Daniel Fuchs, and William Maxwell, 1956 (five stories)
- Bad Characters, 1964
- Collected Stories, 1969
Juvenile books
- Elephi: The Cat with the High I.Q., 1962
- The Lion and the Carpenter and Other Tales from the Arabian Tales Retold, 1962
Nonfiction
- A Mother in History, 1966, a profile of Marguerite Oswald, mother of Lee Harvey Oswald
Short stories
| 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 |
Dramatic adaptations
"The Hope Chest" was adapted into a 30-minute TV film in 1952, starring Florence Bates. "The Scarlet Letter" was adapted into a 30-minute TV film in 1982, starring Christian Slater as Virgil Meade.
References
- ^ a b c d e f "Jean Stafford, American writer". Britannica online. Retrieved December 5, 2025.
- ^ a b c d e f Lask, Thomas (March 28, 1979). "Jean Stafford, 63, Writer, Dead". The New York Times. Archived from the original on June 25, 2024.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p Goodman, Charlotte Margolis (2004). "Stafford, Jean". In Ware, Susan; Braukman, Stacy (eds.). Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary Completing the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, Massachusetts / London: Harvard University–Belknap. pp. 608–09. ISBN 9780674014886.
- ^ a b c d e f g Yardley, Jonathan (February 12, 2007). "Jean Stafford, Diamond in A Rough Life". The Washington Post. Archived from the original on June 15, 2013.
- ^ a b c d Seymour, Miranda (July 21, 2022). "'Turbulence and Misery'". The New York Review of Books.
- ^ a b c Sehgal, Parul (November 27, 2019) [November 26, 2019]. "Books of the Times: Jean Stafford's Novels Frankly Survey the Kingdom of Childhood". The New York Times. Archived from the original on July 2, 2025.
- ^ "Guide to the Center for Advanced Studies Records". Wesleyan University. Archived from the original on March 14, 2017.
- ^ Oates, Joyce Carol (August 28, 1988). "Adventures in Abandonment". The New York Times. Retrieved June 15, 2016.
- ^ White, E. B.; Strunk, Jr. (1979). The Elements of Style (3rd ed.). Macmillan Publishers. p. 21.
External links
- Jean Stafford at Internet Accuracy Project
- Jean Stafford at Find a Grave
- An Influx of Poets, a novel excerpt, Narrative Magazine, (Spring 2004).
- Articles in Western American Literature on Jean Stafford