Jean Stafford: The Savage Heart

Charlotte Margolis Goodman

Published by University of Texas Press 1990

Jean Stafford

The Savage Heart

Charlotte Margolis Goodman

https://doi.org/10.7560/740228

Overview
Contents

About this book

One of America's best short story writers and author of three fine novels, Boston Adventure (1944), The Mountain Lion (1947), and The Catherine Wheel (1952), Jean Stafford has been rediscovered by another generation of readers and scholars. Although her novels and her Pulitzer Prize–winning short stories were widely read in the 1940s and 1950s, her fiction has received less critical attention than that of other distinguished contemporary American women writers such as Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, and Eudora Welty. In this literary biography, Charlotte M. Goodman traces the life of the brilliant yet troubled Jean Stafford and reassesses her importance.

Drawing on a wealth of original material, Goodman describes the vital connections between Stafford's life and her fiction. She discusses Stafford's difficult family relationships, her tempestuous first marriage to the poet Robert Lowell, her unresolved conflicts about gender roles, her alcoholism and bouts with depression—and her amazing ability to transform the chaotic details of her life into elegant works of fiction. These wonderfully crafted works offer insightful portraits of alienated and isolated characters, most of whom exemplify not only human estrangement in the modern world, but also the special difficulties of girls and women who refuse to play traditional roles.

Goodman locates Jean Stafford within the literary world of the 1940s and 1950s. In her own right, and through her marriages to Robert Lowell, Life magazine editor Oliver Jensen, and journalist A. J. Liebling, Stafford associated with many of the major literary figures of her day, including the Southern Fugitives, the New York intellectual coterie, and writers for the New Yorker, to which she regularly contributed short stories. Goodman also describes Stafford's sustaining friendships with other women writers, such as Evelyn Scott and Caroline Gordon, and with her New Yorker editor, Katharine S. White.

This highly readable biography will appeal to a wide audience interested in twentieth-century literature and the writing of women's lives.

Author / Editor information

Charlotte M. Goodman is Professor Emerita of English at Skidmore College.

Reviews

The integration of life and art, so central to a study of Jean Stafford's fiction, is the focus of Professor Goodman's book. Using the wealth of available documents and many interviews, this scholar explores the circumstances which contributed to a rebellious, often self-destructive personality.... Professor Goodman's meticulous use of sources makes her book a classic justification of studying an artist's life so closely as to know that events, elating or horrifying, can be transmuted into high aesthetic experience.

— American Literature

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Preface Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
1. The Shorn Lamb: 1915-1922 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
2. Cowboys and Indians and Magic Mountains: 1922-1936 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	16
3. Old Flaming Youth: 1936-1938 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	40
4. I Love Someone: Summer and Fall 1938 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	69
5. Boston Adventure: Winter 1938-Spring 1940 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	85
6. Sensations Sweet and Sour: Summer 1940-Fall 1943 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	108
7. An Influx of Poets: Fall 1943-Fall 1946 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	132
8. The Bleeding Heart: Fall 1946-Summer 1949 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	164
9. The Catherine Wheel: Fall 1949-Spring 1952 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	200
10. In the Zoo: Summer 1952-Spring 1956 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	229
11. Life Is No Abyss: Summer 1956-Winter 1963 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	251
12. The End of a Career: January 1964-Spring 1975 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	279
13. In the Snowfall: Summer 1975-Spring 1979 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	314
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	327
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	367
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	393

Language: English
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 416

eBook

Published: November 19, 2013
ISBN: 9780292759732