Jean Stafford: Complete Stories & Other Writings (LOA #342): The Collected Stories / Uncollected Stories / A Mother in History / Essays

by Jean Stafford, Kathryn Davis (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781598536829
Publisher:	Library of America
Publication date:	04/06/2021
Pages:	790
Sales rank:	1,082,651
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Jean Stafford (1915-1979) grew up in southern California and Colorado. After graduating from the University of Colorado in 1936, she studied in Heidelberg for a year, then moved to the Northeast and began to write. Stafford would publish three novels, Boston Adventure (1944), The Mountain Lion (1947), The Catherine Wheel (1952), more than forty short stories (The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1970), and A Mother in History (1966), a journalistic portrait of Marguerite Oswald, mother of Lee Harvey Oswald.

Kathryn Davis is the Hurst Writer in Residence at Washington University and the author of eight novels, including Labrador, The Walking Tour, Duplex, and The Silk Road. She has received the Katherine Anne Porter Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction.

Table of Contents

The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford 1

Author's Note 3

The Innocents Abroad 5

Maggie Meriwether's Rich Experience 7

The Children's Game 22

The Echo and the Nemesis 37

The Maiden 56

A Modest Proposal 66

Caveat Emptor 76

The Bostonians, and Other Manifestations of the American Scene 93

Life Is No Abyss 95

The Hope Chest 114

Polite Conversation 120

A Country Love Story 132

The Bleeding Heart 145

The Lippia Lawn 168

The Interior Castle 176

Cowboys and Indians, and Magic Mountains 191

The Healthiest Girl in Town 193

The Tea Time of Stouthearted Ladies 213

The Mountain Day 225

The Darkening Moon 244

Bad Characters 256

In the Zoo 276

The Liberation 297

A Reading Problem 315

A Summer Day 336

The Philosophy Lesson 351

Manhattan Island 361

Children Are Bored on. Sunday 363

Beatrice Trueblood's Story 374

Between the Porch and the Altar 394

I Love Someone 401

Cops and Robbers 409

The Captain's Gift 421

The End of a Career 430

Other Stories

And Lots of Solid Color 449

A Reunion 457

The Home Front 463

A Slight Maneuver 487

The Cavalier 497

Old Flaming Youth 515

The Violet Rock 526

The Connoisseurs 544

A Winter's Tale 560

The Warlock 597

My Blithe, Sad Bird 623

A Reasonable Facsimile 643

The Scarlet Letter 665

The Ordeal of Conrad Pardee 684

An Influx of Poets 703

Woden's Day 727

Mother in History 749

Selected Essays

The Psychological Novel 815

Truth and the Novelist 828

An Etiquette for Writers 839

Chronology 859

Note on the Texts 873

Notes 878

Editorial Reviews

02/22/2021

This exhaustive repackaging of Stafford’s richly satisfying 1970 Pulitzer Prize–winning collection is supplemented by 16 short stories and four nonfiction works. Stafford’s prose is lyrically entrancing, anchored by a boundless vocabulary and taking readers through Europe, the East Coast, and to Adams, Colo., a “semi-fictitious” version of Boulder. Her characters—often out of their element, by choice or by fate—seek a sense of belonging but rarely find one. Standout stories are by turns cautiously hopeful (“The Mountain Day”), wistfully ambiguous (“A Country Love Story”), deliciously creepy (“The Bleeding Heart”), and charmingly innocent (“The Violet Rock”). Less enjoyable is “A Mother in History,” Stafford’s lengthy interview of Marguerite Oswald, mother of Lee Harvey Oswald, who claims to have (but can’t disclose) evidence exonerating her son and says she has “been persecuted and have suffered just like my son.” Of the three concluding essays, only the last—a speech delivered in July 1952 at her alma mater, the University of Colorado—truly resonates, offering insights on her career, a critique of the literary profession, and a final assertion almost unthinkable today: “keeping oneself before the public eye is, I think, totally inessential.” The most familiar work remains her best, and this burly tome offers a worthy occasion to rediscover it. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"Jean Stafford’s stories and journalism often crackled with wit—and smoldered with rage." —The Wall Street Journal

From the Publisher