Jean Stafford
Jean Stafford was an American short story writer and novelist. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Collected Stories of Jean Stafford">The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford">Collected Stories of Jean Stafford in 1970.
Early life and education
Stafford was born in Covina, California, the fourth child of Mary Ethel 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. Stafford's second novel, The Mountain Lion, draws on her childhood in Colorado. She earned bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Colorado Boulder in 1936, and then studied for a year at the University of Heidelberg on a fellowship. Later in the 1930s she was briefly enrolled in graduate school at the University of Iowa.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.Her first novel, Boston Adventure, was a best-seller. With the proceeds she was able to buy a house in Damariscotta Mills, Maine. She wrote two more novels, but became better known for her short stories, many of which were published in The New Yorker.
Stafford also published many book reviews. She served as secretary of The Southern Review while living in Baton Rouge with her first husband, and for the academic year 1964–1965 was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies of Wesleyan University.
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. She won seven O Henry Awards for her short stories, and in 1970 The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She was made a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.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. She nonetheless married him in April 1940; the marriage ended in divorce in 1948. A second marriage to Life magazine staff writer Oliver Jensen in 1950 also ended in divorce, in 1953. 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. 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.For much of her life she suffered from alcoholism and depression. She was hospitalized at Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic for almost a year in the late 1940s. She had a stroke in 1976 and developed emphysema; she died in a clinic in White Plains, New York, in 1979, at the age of 63. Her ashes were placed with Liebling's in Green River Cemetery in East Hampton.
Legacy
The Library of America republished Stafford's fiction in 2019 and 2021.Several biographies of Jean Stafford were written following her death, including David Roberts' Jean Stafford: a Biography, Charlotte Margolis Goodman's Jean Stafford: The Savage Heart, and Ann Hulbert's The Interior Castle: The Art and Life of Jean Stafford.
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."
Works
Novels
Short story collections
- Children Are Bored on Sunday, 1953, includes "The Interior Castle"
- A Book of Stories, with John Cheever, Daniel Fuchs, and William Maxwell, 1956
- 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