Jean Stafford Books

For the first time, the complete stories of a Pulitzer Prize-winning master of the form, plus her fascinating portrait of the mother one of the world's most infamous assassins This volume collects for the first time the complete stories of a Pulitzer Prize–winning master of the form, a writer acclaimed for her acute psychological insight, exacting eye for detail, and mordant sensibility. Set in New England, Colorado, New York, and Europe, Jean Stafford’s stories intimately examine the lives of women and men beset by restlessness, dislocation, and isolation. “The Interior Castle” takes us inside an accident victim’s physical and mental pain; “A Country Love Story” chillingly depicts marital estrangement and mental breakdown amidst the solitude of a Maine winter; “Bad Characters” is the exuberant story of a young girl led into mischief by an incorrigible friend; and “An Influx of Poets” is a haunting story of a marriage wrecked by literary ambition and egotism. The volume also includes A Mother in History, Stafford’s controversial journalistic profile of Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother, Marguerite, and three revealing literary essays.

"Miss Stafford writes with brilliance. Scene after scene is told with unforgettable care and tenuous entanglements are treated with wise subtlety. She creates a splendid sense of time, of the unending afternoons of youth, and of the actual color of noon and of night. Refinement of evil, denial of drama only make the underlying truth more terrible. "--Saturday Review"Hard to match . . . for subtlety and understanding. . . written wittily, lucidly, and with great respect for the resources of the language. "--New YorkerComing of age in pre-World War II California and Colorado brings tragedy to Molly and Ralph Fawcett in Jean Stafford's classic semi-autobiographical novel, first published in 1947. Torn between their mother's world of genteel respectability and their grandfather's and uncle's world of cowboy masculinity, neither Molly nor Ralph can find an acceptable adult role to aspire to. As events move to their swift and inevitable conclusion, Stafford uncovers and indicts the social forces that require boys to sacrifice the feminine in order to become men and doom intelligent girls who aren't pretty.

A provocative story of class struggle, privilege, and poverty that put American author Jean Stafford on the map. Growing up in a fishing village north of Boston between the wars, Sonie, the child of immigrants, is so poor that she must “sleep on a pallet made of old coats and comforters.” She can only dream of the feather beds and perfumed soap to be found in the great city across the bay. In the summers, while helping her mother clean rooms in a shoreside hotel, she keeps company with the austere and fascinating Miss Pride. Years pass, and Sonie—now the caretaker of her fragile mother—receives an invitation from Miss Pride to move to Beacon Hill and be her personal secretary. Salvation, she thinks, is at hand. In Boston, Sonie does come to know a new and broader world, one in which she mingles with both blue bloods and louche European refugees, and yet her troubles, she discovers, are hardly over. Boston Adventure was published when Jean Stafford was twenty-nine, and it was an immediate best seller. Combining Dickensian color and Proustian insight in its depiction of an isolated but determined young woman, it looks forward to Stafford’s celebrated novel The Mountain Lion as well as to the short stories for which she would be awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1970.

A memoir centered on the death of the author's husband forms a study on the joys and frustrations of their marriage, the passage of time, and how life and imagination influence each other.

Introduced by Hilton Als, in 'one of the best novels about adolescence in American literature' (New York Times) two siblings come of age in a mountainous wilderness ...

In der Titelstory »Das Leben ist kein Abgrund« trifft die junge Lily auf ihre zynische und stolze Cousine Isobel, die lieber ein karges Dasein im Armenhaus fristet, als die Hilfe ihrer Familie in Anspruch zu nehmen. Eine glücklich Verheiratete erfährt im schneebedeckten Maine, was es bedeutet, plötzlich schutzlos und entfremdet ihrem Mann gegenüber zu stehen. Eine Schwerverletzte flieht vor dem Schmerz und sucht Zuflucht in ihrem Inneren. Und mitten in einem »Andrang von Dichtern« muss sich die willensstarke Cora Maybank gegen ihren egozentrischen, untreuen und vor Ehrgeiz blinden Ehemann behaupten. Mit scharfem psychologischem Blick beleuchtet die Pulitzerpreisträgerin in ihren Stories das menschliche Leben in all seinen Facetten. In eindringlichen Bildern und mit leisem Humor erzählt Jean Stafford von Liebe und Leid, vom ewigen Wunsch nach Zugehörigkeit und insbesondere vom Schmerz der Einsamkeit.