Jean Stafford

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.

Her fiction is highly regarded for its elegant style and its precision in rendering the social isolation of her characters.

Stafford’s short fiction is frequently anthologized.

Early life and education

Jean Stafford was born in Covina, California, 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. Stafford's second novel, The Mountain Lion (1947), 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 (1944), 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 the summer of 1956 Stafford traveled to London in search of subject matter. There she met editor Eve Auchincloss who would become a friend and mentor. Stafford’s editor at The New Yorker, Katherine S. White, introduced her to A. J. Liebling, a prominent American journalist at the periodical, who was living in England. Stafford and Leibing had long held one another’s work in high esteem. In 1959 they married. The union was a happy one, but ended with his death in 1963.

Stafford 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.

A novel-in-progress, The Parliament of Women, remained unfinished at the time of her death.

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 (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."

Novels

• Boston Adventure, 1944
• The Mountain Lion, 1947
• The Catherine Wheel, 1952
• The Interior Castle (1953), includes Boston Adventure (1944), The Mountain Lion (1947), and the short story collection Children Are Bored on Sunday (1953)

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

Uncollected short fiction

The date and journal of publication are indicated for these uncollected works of short fiction.

• “And Lots of Solid Color” (American Prefaces 5, November 1939)
• “The Cavalier” (The New Yorker, February 12, 1949)
• “The Connosseurs” (Harper’s Bazaar, October 1952)
• “An Influx of Poets” (The New Yorker, November 6, 1978)
• “Mountain Jim” (Boy’s Life, February 1968)
• “My Blythe, Sad Bird” (The New Yorker, April 6, 1957)
• “Old Flaming Youth” (Harper’s Bazaar, December 1950)
• “The Ordeal of Conrad Pardee” (Ladies’ Home Journal, July 1964)
• “A Reunion” (Partisan Review 11, Autumn 1944)
• “The Scarlet Letter” (Mademoiselle, July 1959)
• “A Slight Maneuver" (Mademoiselle, February 1947)
• “The Violet Rock” (The New Yorker, April 16, 1952)
• “The Warlock” (The New Yorker, December 24, 1955)
• “Woden’s Day” (Shenandoah, Autumn 1979)

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.

Footnotes

Sources

• Howe, Irving. 1952. “Sensibility Troubles.” The Kenyon Review, Spring, 1952, Vol. 14, No. 2, The Dante Number (Spring, 1952), pp. 345-348 Kenyon College. Accessed 23 February, 2026.
• Leary, William. 1987. “Pictures at an Exhibition: Jean Stafford's 'Children Are Bored on Sunday.'” The Kenyon Review, Spring, 1987, New Series, Vol. 9, No. 2, pp.1-8. Published by: Kenyon College Accessed 17 February, 2026.
• Oates, Joyce Carol. 1965. “Review: Notions Good and Bad Reviewed Work(s): Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey: Bad Characters by Jean Stafford: Cabot Wright Begins by James Purdy.” The Kenyon Review, Winter, 1965, Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 175-180. Published by: Kenyon College Accessed 17 February, 2026.
• Peden, William. 1953. “A Bleak, Sad World; CHILDREN ARE BORED ON SUNDAY.” New York Times, May 10, 1953. Accessed 12 February, 2026.
• Roberts, David. 1988. “Jean & Joe: The Stafford-Liebling Marriage.” The American Scholar, Summer 1988, Vol. 57, No. 3 , pp. 373-391 The Phi Beta Kappa Society Accessed 23 February, 2026.
• Ryan, Maureen. 1994. “Green Visors and Ivory Towers: Jean Stafford and the New Journalism.” The Kenyon Review, Autumn, 1994, New Series, Vol. 16, No. 4 pp. 104-119. Kenyon College. Accessed 17 February, 2026.
• Toynton, Evelyn. 1991. Books in Review: Jean Stafford: The Savage Heart by Charlotte Margolis Goodman. Salmagundi, No. 92 (Fall 1991), pp. 238-244. Skidmore College. Accessed 20 February 2026.
• Wilson, Mary Ann. 1996. Jean Stafford: A Study of the Short Fiction. Twayne Publishers. Simon & Schuster, New York. ISBN 0-8057-7807-1

External links

• at Internet Accuracy Project
• at Find a Grave
• , a novel excerpt, Narrative Magazine, (Spring 2004).