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Jean Stafford: Complete Stories & Other Writings

The Collected Stories (1969) | uncollected stories | A Mother in History | essays More

Edited by Kathryn Davis

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

Story of the Week Jean Stafford, “Old Flaming Youth”
July 1, 2022

Story of the Week Jean Stafford, “Children Are Bored on Sunday”
March 12, 2021

For more than three decades Jean Stafford wrote masterful short fiction, perfecting a versatile style marked by acute psychological insight, an exacting eye for detail, and a bitingly satiric sensibility. Whether in Europe, New England, Colorado, or New York, her mostly female protagonists seek a sense of belonging to quell restlessness, dislocation, and isolation, conditions that Stafford knew all too well in her own life. “Most of the people in these stories,” Stafford wrote in the preface to her Pulitzer Prize–winning Collected Stories (1969), “are away from home, too, and while they are probably homesick, they won’t go back.” This volume collects all of Stafford’s stories, as well as A Mother in History (1966), her controversial journalistic profile of Marguerite Oswald, the mother of Lee Harvey Oswald, and three revealing literary essays.

Stafford established herself as a story writer in the 1940s, publishing in both literary journals and general interest magazines and beginning a long association with The New Yorker. “The Interior Castle” is a harrowing immersion in one woman’s physical and mental pain as she undergoes surgery after an automobile accident. “Children Are Bored on Sunday” brilliantly punctures the pretensions of postwar New York intellectuals. “A Country Love Story” is a chilling depiction of marital and mental breakdown during the solitude of winter in Maine. “In the Zoo” portrays two orphaned sisters bound together by indelible memories of their unloving and scornful foster mother. Stafford’s love for Mark Twain is displayed in the delightful “Bad Characters,” as she tells how young Emily Vanderpool is led astray by the incorrigible Lottie Jump. “An Influx of Poets,” inspired by her marriage to the poet Robert Lowell, is a perceptive story of marital estrangement and a lacerating portrait of male literary ambition and egotism.

In 1965 Stafford interviewed Marguerite Oswald, the mother of President Kennedy’s accused assassin. A Mother in History is the acerbic result, a portrait of a woman hungry for money, fame, and attention, full of righteous self-pity, obsessed with bizarre conspiracy theories, and relentless in professing her son’s blamelessness: “Killing does not necessarily mean badness. You find killing in some very fine homes for one reason or another.”

Kathryn Davis, editor, 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.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
Table of Contents

THE COLLECTED STORIES OF JEAN STAFFORD
Author’s Note

The Innocents Abroad
Maggie Meriwether’s Rich Experience
The Children’s Game
The Echo and the Nemesis
The Maiden
A Modest Proposal
Caveat Emptor

The Bostonians, and Other Manifestations of the American Scene
Life Is No Abyss
The Hope Chest
Polite Conversation
A Country Love Story
The Bleeding Heart
The Lippia Lawn
The Interior Castle

Cowboys and Indians, and Magic Mountains
The Healthiest Girl in Town
The Tea Time of Stouthearted Ladies
The Mountain Day
The Darkening Moon
Bad Characters
In the Zoo
The Liberation
A Reading Problem
A Summer Day
The Philosophy Lesson

Manhattan Island
Children Are Bored on Sunday
Beatrice Trueblood’s Story
Between the Porch and the Altar
I Love Someone
Cops and Robbers
The Captain’s Gift
The End of a Career

OTHER STORIES
And Lots of Solid Color
A Reunion
The Home Front
A Slight Maneuver
The Cavalier
Old Flaming Youth
The Violet Rock
The Connoisseurs
A Winter’s Tale
The Warlock
My Blithe, Sad Bird
A Reasonable Facsimile
The Scarlet Letter
The Ordeal of Conrad Pardee
An Influx of Poets
Woden’s Day

A MOTHER IN HISTORY

SELECTED ESSAYS
The Psychological Novel
Truth and the Novelist
An Etiquette for Writers

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ISBN: 978-159853682-9 927 pages

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N° 342 Library of America Series

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