Stafford Jean Jean Stafford: Complete Stories & Other Writings

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 Jean Stafford (1915-1979) ranks with John Cheever, Eudora Welty, Peter Taylor, and Katherine Anne Porter as a 20th-century master of the American short story. This Library of America volume collects for the first time all 45 stories Stafford published in her lifetime as well as the posthumous Woden's Day, and includes The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford, which won the Pulitzer Prize, as well as fifteen stories currently unavailable in print, twelve of which have never been published in book form. Set mainly in Germany, New England, Colorado, and New York City, her stories combine an exacting eye for physical detail with acute psychological insight, examining the lives of her mostly female protagonists as they seek a sense of place and belonging in the face of restlessness, dislocation, isolation, and powerlessness. Among her most well-known stories are The Interior Castle, an excruciating exploration of an accident victim's physical and psychological pain; Bad Characters, a delightful account of a young girl's misdeeds in Colorado; Children Are Bored on Sunday, a merciless satire of New York intellectual and artistic life in the Partisan Review era; and An Influx of Poets, inspired by her tumultuous marriage to the poet Robert Lowell. As a special feature, the volume also includes A Mother in History (1966), Stafford's controversial journalistic profile of Marguerite Oswald, the mother of President Kennedy's accused assassin. With meticulous precision Stafford records Marguerite's bizarre arguments in defense of her son's innocence while offering a chilling portrait of an utterly self-absorbed individual.