Background
Stafford, Jean was born on July 1, 1915 in Covina, California, United States. Daughter of John Richard and Mary Ethel (McKillop) Stafford, Bachelor of Arts, Univercity Colorado, 1936, A.M., 1936.
(Contains two complete novels, Boston Adventure and The Mo...)
Contains two complete novels, Boston Adventure and The Mountain Lion, and a collection of short stories, Children are bored on Sunday. The scope of Boston Adventure is a very broad one. The novel, which begins with what is happening to an emigrant German shoemaker, his unhappy Russian wife and their two loveless children, spreads out to take in practically all of the people in the fishing village of Chichester and its resort hotel, and then expands still further to embrace the lives and loves of many of the richest people of Beacon Hill. There are innumerable scenes that are unforgettable, such as where a violently insane woman holds her daughter captive and in fear of death all night beside a stove flaming with a fierce fire in torrid midsummer weather, and the pretended burial of a child at sea. The sharp witted encounters of people in a Beacon Hill drawing room are social satire at its best. The Mountain Lion covers two entirely different segments of society. The Fawcett family, with the swooning, shrieking mother at its head, lives one kind of life with its neighbors - and the neighbors become very well known to us, too - while their Kenyon relatives live another. The first unfolding of a boy's spirit into a confusion of love and sex is very real. Children are Bored on Sunday is a satirical examination of avant-garde intellectual life in New York through the eyes of a self-styled "rube," The Home Front, about a German doctor in an American defense plant town. The Interior Castle is set in the featureless ether-smelling world of a hospital where the heroine is recovering after a near-fatal accident. The versatile forms of these stories - ranging from satire to interior monologue, from pathos to grotesquerie - are carried out in a style so consistently controlled, so full of imaginative power and so alive to nuance both verbal and pictorial, that the collection takes on a compelling unity in its very diversity.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0007E0T4Q/?tag=2022091-20
( Eight-year-old Molly and her ten-year-old brother Ralph...)
Eight-year-old Molly and her ten-year-old brother Ralph are inseparable, in league with each other against the stodgy and stupid routines of school and daily life; against their prim mother and prissy older sisters; against the world of authority and perhaps the world itself. One summer they are sent from the genteel Los Angeles suburb that is their home to backcountry Colorado, where their uncle Claude has a ranch. There the children encounter an enchanting new world—savage, direct, beautiful, untamed—to which, over the next few years, they will return regularly, enjoying a delicious double life. And yet at the same time this other sphere, about which they are both so passionate, threatens to come between their passionate attachment to each other. Molly dreams of growing up to be a writer, yet clings ever more fiercely to the special world of childhood. Ralph for his part feels the growing challenge, and appeal, of impending manhood. Youth and innocence are hurtling toward a devastating end.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/159017352X/?tag=2022091-20
( These Pulitzer Prize-winning stories represent the majo...)
These Pulitzer Prize-winning stories represent the major short works of fiction by one of the most distinctively American stylists of her day. Jean Stafford communicates the small details of loneliness and connection, the search for freedom and the desire to belong, that not only illuminate whole lives but also convey with an elegant economy of words the sense of the place and time in which her protagonists find themselves. This volume also includes the acclaimed story "An Influx of Poets," which has never before appeared in book form.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374529930/?tag=2022091-20
novelist writer short story writer
Stafford, Jean was born on July 1, 1915 in Covina, California, United States. Daughter of John Richard and Mary Ethel (McKillop) Stafford, Bachelor of Arts, Univercity Colorado, 1936, A.M., 1936.
Postgraduate U. Heidelberg, 1936-1937. Doctor of Hebrew Literature, Doctor of Letters.
Her first novel, Boston Adventure was a best-seller, earning her national acclaim. For the academic year 1964-1965, she was a Fellow on the faculty at the Center for Advanced Studies of Wesleyan University. 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.
( Eight-year-old Molly and her ten-year-old brother Ralph...)
( These Pulitzer Prize-winning stories represent the majo...)
(Contains two complete novels, Boston Adventure and The Mo...)
(Trade Paperback - The Catherine Wheel A Novel by Jean Sta...)
(cover is worn, has writing on the back cover.)
Fellow Center for Advanced Studies, Wesleyan University. Member National Academy Arts and Letters.
Married Robert Lowell, April.; married second, Oliver Jensen, January 28, 1950 (divorced 1953).