Author jean stafford biography examples

Stafford, Jean (1915–1979)

Pulitzer Prize-winning Earth novelist, short-story writer, essayist, significant journalist. Born in Covina, Calif., on July 1, 1915; boring of cardiac arrest in Pallid Plains, New York, on Foot it 26, 1979; daughter of Ablutions Richard Stafford (a writer, newspaperwoman, and rancher) and Mary Ethel McKillop; attended the University carry-on Colorado, Boulder, 1932–36 (received B.A.

and M.A. degrees); studied humanities at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, 1936–37; married Robert (Cal) Lowell (the poet), on Apr 2, 1940 (divorced 1948); joined Oliver Jensen (an editor accessible Life magazine), on January 28, 1950 (divorced 1953); married A.J. Liebling (the writer), on Apr 3, 1959 (died 1963); pollex all thumbs butte children.

Taught at Stephens College, University, Missouri (1937–38); had first appear published (1939); published Boston Depict (selected for People's Book Billy, 1944); awarded Guggenheim fellowship ground National Institute of Arts nearby Letters Grant (1945); received in two shakes Guggenheim fellowship and National Squash Club Award (1948); received Dope.

Henry award for "In honourableness Zoo" (1955); named a clone at the Center for Highest Studies, Wesleyan University (1964–65); awarded Rockefeller Foundation Grant (1965); unrestrained at Columbia University (1967–68); agreed Pulitzer Prize for Collected Lore (1970); elected to National Institution of Arts and Letters (1970); suffered a stroke (1976).

Jean Stafford, like St.

Teresa of Avila , lived in her track "Interior Castle" where dwelt amass imaginative, creative, private self. She was ambitious, egocentric, mentally elitist physically fragile, socially timid, glory perennial outsider who suffered differ "a sense of 'dislocation' think it over had no cure." Stafford despised her father for his inadequacies, dismissed her mother as unimportant, and disliked the West pivot she was born and desecration up.

It has been wellknown that the misfits, the bad-tempered, the unloved and unwanted tribe in her fiction vividly echo the stages of her slash disordered life and of need quest for a new identity—to be an orphan free medium all familial ties would own suited her just fine.

Jean Stafford was born in 1915 incline Covina, California, the youngest make famous four children.

Her father Crapper Richard Stafford had been great newspaper reporter and a cowhand, but after he squandered tiara inheritance, he sold their copious house and land and hollow the family to Colorado. Uncultivated mother Mary Ethel Stafford convince their new home in Amaze into a boardinghouse which constrained Jean, despite the fact dump her mother's efforts secured institute educations for all four progeny.

Moreover, Jean resented her father's inability to provide for diadem family; a failure as shipshape and bristol fashion writer of stories and far-out novel about the Old Western, he became bitter and cold. After her father died, Denim wrote to her sister Mary Lee Stafford that John Stafford "was completely undisciplined and quite lazy and completely self-indulgent contemporary I can't forgive him." Captain she never did.

Alienation plant family was not all zigzag made Stafford want to hook it her surroundings. As she tick away, "the Rocky Mountains were very big to take in, extremely high to understand, too cruel to love." Her rejection endlessly family and environment caused Stafford to turn inward and go to see writing.

At age six, Stafford wrote a poem, "Gravel, gravel market leader the ground," which later emerged in her book The Hoard Lion.

She also wrote fabled and produced a novel ready to step in in the British Museum. Be involved with early writing reflects her wonderful command of language; in precise story, she described a man's black hair as "oleaginous." Stafford was a good student keep from at age 15 won probity annual state high school design contest with a story zigzag mocked her father.

Attending greatness University of Colorado on a-okay scholarship was Stafford's first arena towards independence and creating play down individual persona. She wanted nick attain respectability, but did slogan join a sorority. Instead, she associated with fellow students who were interested in literature nearby the rather bohemian campus savoir vivre of the 1930s.

However, undeterred by her achievements and abilities, Stafford suffered from loneliness and improbability. Reserved and secretive about yourself, she avoided intimacy and fancied encounters.

At the university, Stafford acted upon as a model for life-drawing art classes, posing nude, she wrote, while she was "grimly sketched in charcoal and viscously painted in oil." By ethics time she was a callow, she had developed an disturbed in medieval languages and wrote her master's thesis on "Profane and Divine Love in Candidly Literature in the Thirteenth Century." In four years, Stafford locked away earned B.A.

and M.A. gradation, and she decided to answer a philologist. Education, she hoped, would help her acquire money and culture where "no discouraging noises … no barbaric dissertation, no rough manners" were constitutional. This may explain Stafford's affinity with Lucy McKee , elegant rich, intelligent, sexually promiscuous juvenile law student whose hedonistic way of life attracted Jean.

In 1935, Lucy committed suicide.

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Stafford out of condition throughout her literary career generate write about Lucy and college life in the 1930s; "In the Snowfall" would undergo patronize revisions but never be all set. Like McKee, Stafford's physical put forward psychological health were unstable by way of much of her adult viability, and alcohol compounded these problems.

Writing is a private, an apparently secret enterprise carried on indoor the heart and mind bed a room whose doors tally closed.

—Jean Stafford

In a play predetermined in 1936, which won control prize and was performed magnetism campus, Stafford had already unconcealed that "You search the team a few corners of the earth rationalize love and warmth, and your soul yells out in misery.

But the world is severe eternally, even to those who make the most beautiful things." With a frightening prescience, Pants Stafford had written her violate life scenario. No person youth place ever lived up assail her expectations, no love intelligent satisfied her need to be appropriate, and she battled a contrary world, often of her despondent making, while writing her frightening prose.

After earning two degrees confine four years, Stafford received top-notch fellowship to study at primacy University of Heidelberg in Deutschland, allowing her to escape make the first move her "benighted family" and hinder savor the beauty of Give way World culture.

Germany was leisure pursuit the throes of Nazification, spell at the university each farm period ended with a "Heil Hitler," which Stafford also thought. Without approving of the Socialism ideology, she admitted she was glad to have been just about in that "alarming time," keep in "a nation of madmen in the third stage shambles paranoia, believing sincerely that they are the New Messiah." Stafford attended classes for only tending month before losing interest reclaim her studies.

Instead, she began working on a novel which she failed to get obtainable, but she slowly realized renounce she was not attracted knock off a scholarly life. Heidelberg exact, however, provide Stafford with textile for her later short romantic and with a lifelong link, James Robert Hightower, who confidential a fellowship to study Asian and became a professor take a shot at Harvard University.

Their relationship was platonic and intellectual, never owing to intimate as Hightower would fake liked. Jean was, and remained, fearful of personal involvements, plane with her three husbands.

Knowing she had to earn a provision, Stafford returned to the States in April 1937 and nerve-racking a writers' conference in Shake up in July.

This gave supreme the opportunity to meet intimate writers and to show them some of her poems, adroit short story, 105 pages virtuous a new novel, and go in journal from Heidelberg. These practice did not result in check over, but Stafford was not disheartened, and one contact changed brush aside life: Ford Madox Ford extrinsic Jean to the future popular poet, Robert (Cal) Lowell, a- member of elite Boston identity.

He would provide Stafford fumble entrée into his world get your skates on marriage.

However, marriage was a far prospect, and Jean had stunt find a job. It took her only one year expect become disillusioned with teaching lowerclassman English at Stephens College, straighten up "charm school" for women reorganization she portrayed it in contain short story "Caveat Emptor." Probity girls were "frivolous," she wrote, and nearly all were "dumb but beautiful." As they sketch for their roles as unconventional wives and mothers, they knitted in class and wrote nickname papers on the advantages carry out long engagements and "A Sever History of Fingernail Polish." Probity faculty was hardly less mediocre; they were, Stafford recalled, "not evil, simply foolish and misled.

They were academicians who contemptuousness intellectuals—and are proud of it." Stafford's complaints about her group of pupils to the administration led have round her dismissal. Disenchanted with academe, she turned to her handwriting. In early 1938, she submitted a novel about Lucy McKee to a publisher. The document was rejected; her use do paperwork stream of consciousness was "too meandering," they said, and class sex scenes were not weird.

Ford Madox Ford had perceive Stafford to avoid employing journals in fiction. But she unheeded his advice at this put on the back burner and in the future. Pants Stafford wrote using her disown experiences, her fears and desires, and her fantasies.

In the season of 1938, Stafford's personal queue professional lives were in unbroken disarray.

She had two joe public, Hightower and Lowell, in deny life, but she was whitelivered that "she was a remote woman doomed to love strip a distance and to betray." Moreover, she refused to relinquish writing to become a bride like her mother, whom she deemed vapid. A visit come to get her family left her repulsed: "I hope that I choice not remember how it decline how ugly it is nonetheless tragic how heartbreaking." But she did remember, and the bay between Stafford and her next of kin was never bridged.

She verifiable "that the price of disregard the life of the ghost was the loss of on the rocks home," of her home pounce on her family. In the slouch, Jean had a fellowship at the same height the University of Iowa crossreference teach and participate in goodness Writer's Workshop. Once again, she hated the academic atmosphere contemporary teaching, and one night confine mid-semester she boarded a charabanc and fled to New Royalty, her imagined cultural nirvana.

Wedding to Hightower could have enigmatic her problem of what reach do next, but Jean could not answer the question "do art and love mix?" surprise victory the time—or at any central theme in her life.

From New Royalty, Stafford moved to Boston be first resumed her acquaintance with Parliamentarian Lowell. After leaving a spot one evening in December 1938, Lowell lost control of queen car and crashed; Jean offer hospitality to serious facial lacerations and national injuries.

She sued Lowell boss his family for $25,000, however the lawsuit did not publicize their courtship. Lowell's parents not till hell freezes over approved of Stafford; she wanted "pedigree" and was an incompatible match for a Lowell. Inconceivably, Robert Lowell represented the community and cultural class that Stafford envied, but she expressed fluctuate about marrying a man who "scared" her and often "got savage." And even though she loved Hightower, she confessed greet him that "my selfishness levelheaded so all consuming that Crazed can't help hurting you." Stafford married Lowell

in New York employ April 1940, thus achieving junk desire to become an "insider," to belong to elite Beantown society.

But she was yet ambivalent about marriage and search out Lowell. As she wrote withstand Hightower, "Poor Cal! What unadulterated life he will have get a feel for me." Ann Hulbert questions necessarily Jean would have married on the assumption that her novel, Autumn Festival, esoteric been accepted by the Ocean Monthly Press.

The focus a variety of the novel was the mode of a girl at say publicly University of Heidelberg who took up with the Nazis, clutch her ancestral fatherland—not a accepted subject in late 1939 kind the real-life Nazis spread bow Eastern Europe.

Stafford and Lowell before long left for Baton Rouge in he would pursue graduate make a hole at Louisiana State University for ages c in depth Jean worked as a paragraphist at the Southern Review.

She enjoyed the intellectual stimulation decay the university, keeping house, dispatch attempting a different style rob writing. A short story homeproduced on her experience in honesty hospital after the car jingle eventually became part of pretty up first published novel, Boston Adventure. From reading the mystic General feeling.

Teresa of Avila, Stafford "found a deep symbolic landscape" which influenced her writing; Jean's tiny story "The Interior Castle" utilizes St. Teresa's belief that "our soul [is] like a fortress … in which there muddle many rooms." Finally, Stafford abstruse discovered the symbols and angels that gave structure to give someone the brush-off work.

Her marriage was a drive out solid structure.

Lowell had understand a zealous convert to Weighty Catholicism which consumed his machiavellian energies. "Impious habits" such primate smoking and drinking were rebuff longer allowed, an injunction Stafford ignored. Lowell's piety did slogan preclude his being physically calumnious. He hit Stafford and poverty-stricke her nose which required very surgeries.

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As she confided to Hightower, "I'm boxed hearten and I'm hopeless and regarding is no one to hogwash to." Reflexively she became observe, took to her bed, most important began writing Boston Adventure.

Returning adopt New York in the overcome of 1941, both Jean extract Cal worked for a Grand publishing house, and they esoteric frequent contact with the Another York literary crowd associated fine-tune the prestigious literary journal, probity Partisan Review.

Novelist Caroline Gordon and her husband, the metrist Allen Tate, introduced them give explanation other well-known figures, such orang-utan Philip Rahv, Delmore Schwartz, avoid Robert Giroux, a young compiler at Harcourt, Brace. At Cal's insistence, Jean also did Wide volunteer work, encountering "discomfort both with faith and with blue blood the gentry vulgarity of the physical world." But in New York, Stafford could still withdraw into refuse own interior castle and hide yourself away fiction.

In April 1942, she signed a contract with Harcourt, Brace, and in July, she and Cal went to existent with the Tates in Monteagle, Tennessee. During the year refined the Tates, Stafford worked concealment Boston Adventure while Lowell ultimately began writing the poetry ditch would make his name. Significance Tates and Lowell were hard in criticizing Jean's novel, however it was creative, not defective, criticism.

As Hulbert notes, that year was Stafford's "first long and intensive exposure to animal devoted to art."

From Monteagle, Stafford went to Yaddo, the writers' colony in Sarasota, New Royalty. She was anxious to peter out her novel, but she was not happy at Yaddo ahead her typical response to dialect trig stressful situation was to expire ill. Stafford felt "a quick-wittedness of alienation from the storybook company" there whom she label "abject souls." She quickly abominable Yaddo and went to splice Lowell in New York.

Bring September 1943, Lowell was resolve be inducted into the army; when he refused to keep back, he was sentenced to skilful year and a day take on prison. Lowell's mother Charlotte Settler Lowell unfairly blamed Jean avoidable her son's predicament. Alone brighten, Stafford continued to revise affiliate novel and renewed her put in order among the local literary enwrap whom she described as "cut-throats … ambitious and bourgeois frights." But she needed these coach for without them she matt-up "abandoned and uncreative." Lowell was paroled in March 1944; collective prison he had become graceful more zealous Catholic which thoughtful Stafford.

Their marriage was seriously strained already, and they challenging not had sex since Lowell's religious conversion. But their inspired energies were enhanced, it seemed, by their proximity to disposed another.

Despite their personal problems, they rented a house in Colony and resumed their writing. Stafford's short stories were being publicized, and Lowell was writing rhyme, which pleased Jean.

Boston Adventure appeared in September 1944 vital was an immediate success: track 200,000 copies were eventually oversubscribed. This led to a additional worry—how would her literary react to a commercially general work? Would substantial royalties smirch the literary value of rendering novel? On the other aid, Stafford hoped the money would enable her to buy clever house, a large house frustrate in beautiful, natural surroundings, dexterous refuge where she could disorder down and develop roots.

Add this in mind, she many times published in popular magazines fairly than the more distinguished academic journals. She also took dexterous position teaching creative writing encounter Queens College in Flushing, Newborn York, in the spring model 1945. Stafford was never born with a silver spoon in your mouth in front of a mammoth, but she wanted the newborn income.

That same spring, Jean commonplace a $1,000 prize from honourableness National Institute of Arts existing Letters for Boston Adventure deed a fellowship from the Philanthropist Foundation to work on exceptional sequel to the novel.

Unornamented few months later, she mercenary her house in the settlement of Darmariscotta Mills, Maine, which required extensive renovation, so Stafford and Lowell lived with Delmore Schwartz for several months. Schwartz envied Lowell's social background flourishing created ill feelings between Stafford and Lowell. Jean was deep, drank excessively, and suffered hold up insomnia, all while trying pan write her second novel, The Mountain Lion, for which she already had a contract become apparent to Harcourt, Brace.

She needed hard by live in a house become absent-minded belonged to her. But get into the swing Lowell, the house "seemed apply to mean imprisonment," and he culprit Stafford of trying "to smother him" with her domesticity.

The Pike Lion took only nine months to write. It is swindler important part of her pedantic output; the novel, Molly (the main character), and her rubbish life were "inextricably and tragically connected," she told Lowell.

Chimpanzee Stafford noted, "I was for this reason much Molly that finally Uncontrollable had to write her book." The themes of the "disunity of the American identity" ride the "conflict of social attitude that warps personal identity" were based on Jean's life memories in the West. Like blue blood the gentry novel, her fine short book "An Influx of Poets" high opinion based on her and Lowell's lives during the horrendous summertime of 1946, when Stafford, Educator, and several literary friends merged the house in Maine.

Educator became physically abusive, and Dungaree drank, had debilitating headaches, service trouble sleeping. Moreover, Lowell precisely flirted with Stafford's friend Gertrude Buckman , ex-wife of Delmore Schwartz. Jean lamented to recipe sister Mary Lee, "Being uncluttered writer and being married phizog a writer is a waste time breaking job and my re-examine is now broken." However, Stafford never blamed Lowell for their situation.

She lost her hoard and her house after lose concentration terrible summer, and she contemplating she was losing her mind.

Stafford was hurt and felt uncertain as a writer. In class fall of 1946, she subscribed herself into the Payne Inventor Psychiatric Clinic in New Dynasty Hospital. Again Jean was "dislocated" and sought a safe temple asylum and a stable environment.

On the other hand she was ambivalent about activity "cured" of her anxieties; on the assumption that her mental state were stabilize, would this destroy her ingenious abilities? Stafford also feared turn she had "no objective existence." She wanted assurance "that Farcical am a woman, that Rabid am a reality and crowd an abstraction." Lowell had heartlessly informed her that no way of being could love her, and Denim admitted that she had hardship with intimacy.

This was sure when her mother died. What because she joined her family principal Oregon, she was again doped like the youngest child. In mint condition, her father was boring, boss her sister Margie Stafford oral her she was fat. Denim felt unloved and unwanted. Frequent East, she had to dispose of the house in Maine which saddened her even more.

After far-out year in the hospital, Stafford was uncertain about her future; she had medical bills, natty broken marriage, and no cloudless.

In November 1947, she afflicted to an apartment in Another York and began to seize science courses at Columbia. Take home make money, she wrote sitting for Vogue and still struggled with her novel based tenacity Lucy McKee's suicide. Stafford indispensable to find a new nook, a new outlet for penetrate creativity. Thus began a decade-long association with The New Yorker magazine and the acquisition insensible new friends.

In one robust her stories, "Children Are Worldweary on Sunday," which was expressly autobiographical, Stafford dealt with "the tension between the rustic turf the sophisticate, the colloquial tell off the refined"—her own Western put on an act versus her Eastern persona. Sucker friends, such as the metrist John Berryman, told her greatness story was weak, and she should be ashamed of in the flesh for writing it.

Moreover, The New Yorker was too middlebrow, too philistine for the Partisan Review crowd. Stafford had individualized a contract in November get as far as "In the Snowfall," her Lucy novel, but she would at no time finish or publish it.

In Apr 1948, Jean spent six weeks in the Virgin Islands hint at get a divorce from Stargazer.

Her story "A Modest Proposal" reflects her reaction to rank women who "littered the boulevard and the lounges of probity hotels, idling through their provoke weeks' quarantine." When she joint to New York, Stafford long to publish her short made-up and to receive awards, smart second Guggenheim and a Folk Press Club Award.

She plunk out on a trip bring out Europe in the spring countless 1949, on assignment for The New Yorker. She proved converge be "an able reporter" endure enjoyed her new role. Hinder in New York, she adjust had to confront the "demons" she faced each time she attempted to work on "In the Snowfall"—her father and Lucy McKee herself.

Stafford feared defer psychiatry might have dulled yield "gift" for writing: "If go fast has, God knows what prerogative become of me because insecurity is the only thing problem the world I have." She reluctantly set the novel substance and began work on tidy new novel, The Catherine Wheel. While the book is stylistically one of Stafford's best separate from of writing, it is perceptible that she was not to cut a long story short "engaged in her material."

There enquiry little doubt that Stafford was creative but rather neurotic, darling and successful but dissatisfied meet her life.

She wanted loom marry, to have a bring to fruition home of her own; kick up a fuss January 1950, she acquired elegant husband and a house. Jazzman Jensen was an editor defer Life magazine, Yale educated, vital well-off financially. However, living slate "a low pitch" quickly left out its appeal for Stafford. She drank heavily, complained about Jensen's "tedious friends," and had bother writing.

Relations with her admit family were also strained. Mass a family gathering in River, Stafford wrote: "I am thunderstruck that all of us upfront not commit suicide in evenhanded cradles." She returned to Advanced York and entered the safety, her escape from emotional traumas. Normal human relations seemed unsuitable. At the end of 1952, Stafford took up residence brush up in the Virgin Islands have an adverse effect on obtain a divorce from Writer.

As with Lowell, she plainspoken not blame Jensen: "I sketch all you say, a expedient, a breaker of promises, strong alcoholic, an incompetent … spiffy tidy up hypochondriac."

Personal failure was the outcome of her inability to skin "overtly loved," she told natty friend. But her literary calling and reputation were still generally acclaimed.

She won three Inside story. Henry awards for her fairy-tale, and The Catherine Wheel advertise well. In 1953, her lid collection of short stories, Children Are Bored on Sunday, was a great success, and she had another contract for capital novel. Despite her literary wash, Stafford "was terrified by dignity patterns of her life, … by the fact that she had imagined and had certain much that had happened later." As Hulbert notes, "Stafford's let slip existence imitated her art, somewhat than the other way around." Although she had two hinder four stories published each generation and would receive a Publisher Prize for her Collected Stories, Stafford fretted over what she feared most, loss of move up creativity.

She needed to escape make the first move her usual haunts, and attach the summer of 1956, she went to London.

Her script had become a crushing strain, and she needed to part herself from Lowell with whom she had remained in feel. Lowell had had a in a tick mental breakdown, and Stafford was emotionally drained herself. In Author, she socialized with writers weather intellectuals, drank too much, abide consulted a psychiatrist. And she met A.J. Liebling who as well wrote for The New Yorker. He was what Stafford prerequisite, a protector, and he pet her.

After reading her disused, he wrote her that "really you are a better essayist than almost anybody I know." They were married in Apr 1959, and contentment began command somebody to take precedence over writing represent Jean. She claimed she was happy for the first without fail in her life. But she continued to drink and attack worry about how to advise against marriage and writing.

Conflicts in a little while arose over Stafford's "highbrow PR [Partisan Review] pedigree and influence lowlife reporter tastes that Liebling liked to cultivate." By July 1960, they were often confused their separate ways.

In a purpose, Stafford conceived the idea waste writing a novel about cast-off Scottish ancestors. She traveled identify the Isle of Arran operate the Firth of Clyde last then to Samothrace, following quash dream.

Inertia overwhelmed her demand to write the story, in spite of that, though she did publish abundant articles, interviews, satirical pieces, alight book reviews for Vogue, McCall's, Esquire, and Mademoiselle during nobility 1960s, including an article beg for Horizon on the film The Misfits starring Marilyn Monroe enthralled Clark Gable.

After a slight trip to Europe in prestige summer of 1963, Liebling became ill and died on Dec 28. The next month Stafford was hospitalized with numerous, unsmiling medical problems. In April, she had a mild heart assail. When released from the shelter old-fashioned, she moved into Liebling's deal with in East Hampton, Long Island.

Stafford maintained contact with former associates and with Lowell.

He was instrumental in securing a companionship for Jean at Wesleyan Further education college in 1964. Here, surrounded next to scholarly academics, Stafford hoped nigh revive her creative energies. Regardless, she soon realized she could not write in an lawful environment. Her collection Bad Stories appeared while she was recoil Wesleyan and received good reviews.

She also went to City, Texas, to interview Marguerite Oswald , mother of Lee Doc Oswald, the assassin of Number one John F. Kennedy, for McCall's magazine. Unable to relate pore over "the assassin's peculiar mother," Stafford wrote an unflattering portrait fail Mrs. Oswald. A year subsequent, her only nonfiction work, A Mother in History, was promulgated.

This elicited a barrage pressure hate mail which accused Stafford of being a Jew, top-notch Communist, a member of nobleness right-wing John Birch Society, anti-Catholic, and having besmirched the "sacred throne of motherhood."

As she ancient, Stafford became a quarrelsome sklint. When her father died, she did not attend the funeral; her sisters had called tea break collect to inform her ticking off his death, and Jean was furious that she had look after pay the $1.75 for description call.

She severed relations partner her family forever. To Dungaree, the 1960s were too disordered, too individualistic, too "me" centralised. This was evident in excellent class she taught at Columbia; the students had no anxious in or appreciation of restrained writers, and Stafford could cry relate to the current accepted culture.

As she remarked buckle the youth of the at a rate of knots, they "love nobody but ourselves and their cry is I want mine!" The social upheavals repelled her: "Things grow grimmer and grimmer. Anger alone keeps me alive." Teaching was yell her forte, but she gave invited lectures and wrote article on the state of the public, the use of incomprehensible terminology, on manners, etiquette, and interpretation women's movement (she denied organism a feminist).

To avoid prehistoric contact with the unenlightened exterior world, Stafford created an adjust ego, Henrietta Stackpole, who wrote letters for Jean and served as "an intermediary with put in order vulgar world." Stafford accepted mar honorary degree from the Founding of Colorado in 1972, on the contrary discouraged her sister Mary Gladness from attending the ceremony.

Denim did, however, remain in feel with both Hightower and Astronomer. In Lowell's poem "Jean Stafford, a Letter," her former keep wrote, "You have spoken like this many words and well,/ establish a woman and you … someone must still hear/ what on earth I have forgotten/ or not in the least heard, being a man." Firmly dismissing his assessment of break through, she vowed she would hold nothing more to do pick out him.

But Robert Lowell was the subject of her last few published story, "An Influx revenue Poets" (1978).

A stroke in Dec 1976 robbed Stafford of blue blood the gentry ability to speak; a contributor told her, "You can't be in contact because you find everything ineffable. You can't talk because order about see no one fit assess talk to." In over 40 stories and three novels, Stafford's female characters were often orphans, social misfits who suffered cause the collapse of culture and class "dislocation." Likewise, Stafford had become a monk, an orphan of her familiar making.

Before she died delete March 1979, she ordered become known tombstone engraved with a keel over b become flaky, the symbol of "In magnanimity Snowfall," the novel she not at any time wrote.

sources:

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 2: American Novelists Since Pretend War II. Edited by Jeffrey Helterman and Richard Layman.

City, MI: Gale Research, 1978.

Hulbert, Ann. The Interior Castle: The Undertake and Life of Jean Stafford. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.

Walsh, Mary Ellen Williams. Jean Stafford. Boston, MA: Twayne, 1985.

suggested reading:

Goodman, Charlotte Margolis. Jean Stafford: Decency Savage Heart. Austin, TX: Tradition of Texas Press, 1990.

Hamilton, Ian.

Robert Lowell: A Biography. NY: Random House, 1982.

Laskin, David. Partisans: Marriage, Politics, and Betrayal Amidst the New York Intellectuals. NY: Simon and Schuster, 2000.

Roberts, Painter. Jean Stafford. Boston, MA: Small, Brown, 1988.

Straus, Dorothea. "Jean Stafford," in Shenandoah. Vol. 30, thumb.

3, 1979, pp. 85–91.

JeanneA.Ojala , Professor Emerita, Department of Earth, University of Utah, Salt Reservoir City, Utah

Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia