Jean Stafford; A Biography
Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1988. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. xi, [1], 494, [4] pages. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Name of previous owner on fep. Cover has some wear and soiling. An account of a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer whose blossoming literary career was sabotaged by her personal trauma--unhappy marriages, deteriorated mental health, and alcoholism--studies the many facets of the enigmatic Jean Stafford. From a Kirkus review: Compassionate, thoroughly readable biography of a brilliant, troubled American novelist. Stafford's was a life of affliction, and Roberts conveys its desperation by pursuing the disappointments at its center: how Stafford suffered both feminine and writerly inferiority complexes; how she endured a short, tortuous marriage to the misogynist Robert Lowell, loving him because he could "dominate" her; how poverty and alcoholism--the inheritance of a failed father--made "disenchantment" the theme of her work and life; finally, how, after producing three bright novels, numerous essays and reviews, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning short-story collection, Stafford succumbed to illness and writer's block in her final years after the death of her last husband--A. J. Liebling, alienating publishers and friends, cursing the world en route to death in 1979. Roberts, using Stafford's astounding letters, interviews with numerous surviving friends, and a close reading of her fiction--including several early, unpublished novels--to reconstruct her heartbreaking life. This is a flesh-and-blood portrait of Stafford, a woman in great pain, something biographies often explain but rarely convey. Provocative, illuminating, distressing. 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 first novel, Boston Adventure, was a bestseller, 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. 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 in 1940, left her with lingering emotional and physical scars. She was seriously injured in an automobile accident with Lowell at the wheel in 1938, 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 in 1963, she nearly stopped writing fiction, though she continued to write nonfiction essays. 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 (1988). Condition: Good / No Dust Jacket present.
Keywords: Jean Stafford, Auchincloss, Robert Lowell, Robert Hightower, Wilfrid Sheed, Abbott Liebling, A. J. Leibling, Oliver Jensen, Writer, Short Story, Pulitzer Prize
ISBN: 0316749982
[Book #84923]
Price: $45.00