Jean Stafford


Jean Stafford was an American short story writer and novelist. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford in 1970.

Biography

She was born in Covina, California, to Mary Ethel and John Richard Stafford, a Western pulp writer. As a youth Stafford attended the University of Colorado Boulder and, with friend James Robert Hightower, won a one-year fellowship to study philology at the University of Heidelberg from 1936 to 1937.
Her first novel, Boston Adventure, was a best-seller, earning her national acclaim. She wrote two more novels in her career, but her greatest medium was the short story: her works were published in The New Yorker and various literary magazines. In 1955 she won first place in the O. Henry Awards for her story In the Zoo. For the academic year 1964–1965, she was a Fellow on the faculty at the Center for Advanced Studies of Wesleyan University.
Stafford's personal life was often marked by unhappiness. She was married three times. Her first marriage, to the brilliant but mentally unstable poet Robert Lowell, left her with lingering emotional and physical scars. She was seriously injured in an automobile accident with Lowell at the wheel, a trauma she described in one of her best-known stories, "The Interior Castle," and the disfigurement she suffered as a result was a turning point in her life. A second marriage to Life magazine staff writer Oliver Jensen also ended in divorce. Stafford enjoyed a brief period of domestic happiness with her third husband, A. J. Liebling, a prominent writer for The New Yorker. After his death, she stopped writing fiction.

Death and legacy

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, notably 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.

Works