Jean Stafford

Jean Stafford (1915–1979) was born on a walnut ranch in Covina, California, and moved with her family to Colorado after her father lost most of his money in the stock market. She graduated from the University of Colorado in 1936, studied in Heidelberg for a year, taught in Missouri and Iowa, and then went to the Northeast and began to write full time. Stafford published 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 profile of Marguerite Oswald. She was married three times, to the poet Robert Lowell, 1940–48, to the magazine editor Oliver Jensen, 1950–53, and to The New Yorker writer A.J. Liebling from 1959 until his death in 1963.