The Interior Castle: The Art and Life of Jean Stafford by Ann Hulbert

Description

The brilliant, troubled life behind some of America’s finest short stories. Jean Stafford (1915–1979) wrote fiction of dark, precise elegance — work that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1970 for The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford. Ann Hulbert’s The Interior Castle is the acclaimed biography that finally gives this formidable writer her due.

Hulbert traces Stafford from a rootless Western childhood under a failed-writer father through her tempestuous first marriage to the poet Robert Lowell — a union scarred by infidelity and violence — and into the long, disciplined career that produced her masterpieces. It is a story of talent shadowed by turmoil, and of a woman who turned suffering into art of the highest order without ever romanticizing it.

The essential biography of a writer’s writer. Read it, then read the stories: you will never see them the same way again.

The Interior Castle: The Art and Life of Jean Stafford

The Interior Castle: The Art and Life of Jean Stafford by Ann Hulbert is the acclaimed biography of one of America’s most brilliant — and most troubled — literary talents.

Jean Stafford (1915–1979) was a master of the short story whose precise, darkly elegant fiction won her the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1970 for The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford. Yet her triumphs on the page were shadowed by a life of turmoil: a childhood in the American West under a failed-writer father, and a tempestuous first marriage to poet Robert Lowell that was scarred by infidelity, instability, and her husband’s mental illness.

Hulbert, a noted literary biographer, traces Stafford’s journey from Colorado to The New Yorker, where her journalism and stories earned her a place among the greats of mid-century American letters. Drawing on letters, interviews, and previously unpublished material, she paints a vivid portrait of a woman whose fiction laid bare the anxieties and disillusionments of her time.

Rich, compassionate, and psychologically penetrating, this is an essential biography for readers of American literature, writers, and anyone drawn to the lives behind great art.