Author jean stafford biography examples

I was invited to spend a few days in the Berkshires at the home of one of my closest friends. I wanted to bring what is known as a “hostess” gift, and I knew her well enough to know what not to offer. She loathes scented candles, she has enough linens to supply a minor Hilton, her wine cellar is so admirable that I couldn’t afford anything that it might deserve, her garden has won prizes, we are both trying to control our cravings for chocolate and other lethal carbs.

And then, in one of those cartoon lightbulb over the head moments, it came to me that I would bring a gift that would neither spoil, rot, nor molder in the e back of some closet, something that I knew would nourish her for years to come. I brought the Library America edition of the Stories of Jean Stafford.

This would not be the right gift for everyone. Stafford can be tough. In order to be pleased by her, a reader needs not only an appetite for polished, burnished prose, but also for a rich bitterness, the verbal equivalent of arugula or Campari.

Jean Stafford was born on July 1, 1915 in Covina, California but her family soon moved to Boulder Colorado, Her father wrote Western novels under the name Jack Wonder; her mother took in boarders to supplement his inadequate earnings. She attended the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she came to the attention of Ford Madox Ford. Ford introduced her to Robert Lowell, whom she briefly and disastrously married. She married twice again, for the last time to New Yorker writer A.J. Liebling.

Her output was small: three novels, Boston Adventure, The Mountain Lion, and Catherine Wheel, and forty-five stories that were collected in 1969 and belatedly won her the Pulitzer Prize. This relative sparsity was most likely related to her suffering both from depression and alcoholism, which contributed to her early death at 63. I believe that

One of America's best short story writers and author of three fine novels, Boston Adventure (1944), The Mountain Lion (1947), and The Catherine Wheel (1952), Jean Stafford has been rediscovered by another generation of readers and scholars. Although her novels and her Pulitzer Prize–winning short stories were widely read in the 1940s and 1950s, her fiction has received less critical attention than that of other distinguished contemporary American women writers such as Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, and Eudora Welty. In this literary biography, Charlotte M. Goodman traces the life of the brilliant yet troubled Jean Stafford and reassesses her importance.

Drawing on a wealth of original material, Goodman describes the vital connections between Stafford's life and her fiction. She discusses Stafford's difficult family relationships, her tempestuous first marriage to the poet Robert Lowell, her unresolved conflicts about gender roles, her alcoholism and bouts with depression—and her amazing ability to transform the chaotic details of her life into elegant works of fiction. These wonderfully crafted works offer insightful portraits of alienated and isolated characters, most of whom exemplify not only human estrangement in the modern world, but also the special difficulties of girls and women who refuse to play traditional roles.

Goodman locates Jean Stafford within the literary world of the 1940s and 1950s. In her own right, and through her marriages to Robert Lowell, Life magazine editor Oliver Jensen, and journalist A. J. Liebling, Stafford associated with many of the major literary figures of her day, including the Southern Fugitives, the New York intellectual coterie, and writers for the New Yorker, to which she regularly contributed short stories. Goodman also describes Stafford's sustaining friendships with other women writers, such as Evelyn Scott and Caroline Gordon, and with her New Yorker editor, Katharine S. White.