Jean Stafford: A Biography
Category: Books,Biographies & Memoirs,Arts & Literature
Jean Stafford: A Biography Details
From Publishers Weekly Like her first husband, Robert Lowell, and many of their friends, American novelist and short-story writer Jean Stafford drank and smoked to excess, was casual about nutrition and suffered from a nearly uninterrupted gauntlet of mental and physical problems. Brought up in the West (Roberts, former eidtor at Horizon magazine, regards her as the best writer "ever to come out of Colorado"), Stafford fled east soon after her college graduation and eventually became a member of the literary establishment. This long, faithful, depressing biography relates the relentless probing of unhappiness and loss in her fiction to the details of her own life, chronicles her three marriages, two early successful novels ( Boston Adventure and Mountain Lion ), mental breakdown and her declining last days producing ephemeral nonfiction. During her "celebrity" years on Long Island, she became ever more spiteful, petulant, resentful, peevish and tyrannical, according to Roberts. She suffered a stroke that caused virtually total aphasia, then, "thumbing her nose at the world," she died at 63, in 1979. This sensitive book will help to fuel the rekindled interest in her work. Photos not seen by PW. Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. Read more From Library Journal By the late 1940s Jean Stafford was hailed as the best writer of her generation. She was much better known than her husband, a struggling poet named Robert Lowell. Yet by her death in 1979 she was recalled, if at all, as Lowell's long-suffering first wife. Years of writer's block and changing literary fashions led to obscurity despite a 1970 Pulitzer Prize for her Collected Stories . This biography should assist a recent revival of interest in her work. Roberts's portrait of young Stafford's early rebellion against middle-class life in Colorado is compelling. His treatment of her disastrous marriages, alcoholism, and thwarted artistry is perhaps more recitative than analytical, but general readers will find this an accessible and sympathetic chronicle of a remarkable American woman. Starr E. Smith, Georgetown Univ., Washington, D.CCopyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. Read more
Reviews
A search of the Internet will show several book reviews of David Roberts' "Jean Stafford: A Biography." Joyce Carol Oates wrote a rather negative one of the book in the August 28, 1988 New York Times. She writes: "David Roberts, author of four books on the outdoors, has written a seemingly well-intentioned but numbingly repetitive and emetic life of Jean Stafford that falls into pathography's technique of emphasizing the sensational underside of its subject's life to the detriment of those more scattered, and less dramatic, periods of accomplishment and well being." I do not agree with Oates, although I do admire her own writings. I do not believe that Roberts has an intention of "emphasizing the sensational underside" of Jean Stafford. He presents the information about her life from his research in a chronological way. Occasionally, his opinion slips into his writing. In fact, one gets the impression of how much Roberts admires Stafford. I believe anyone wanting to know about the life of Jean Stafford will benefit from this 1988 biography.