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

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.

About author(s):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.