1970 Pulitzer Prize Review: The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford by Jean Stafford

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The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford is dedicated to Katharine S. White (1892-1977), the former spouse of E.B. White and key editor at The New Yorker who helped develop many of the careers of major 20th century literary figures like Vladimir Nabokov, John O’Hara, John Cheever, John Updike, Ogden Nash, and Jean Stafford. Of the thirty or so short stories gathered in Jean Stafford’s collection (originally published between the 1940s and 1960s), eighteen of them first appeared in The New Yorker while the rest could be found in publications like Harper’s and The Partisan Review. Upon publication in 1969, The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford was celebrated throughout American literary circles, ranking as a finalist for the National Book Award and winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1970. Notably, The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford was only the second short story collection to win the Pulitzer Prize by that point after The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter in 1966 –not counting James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific which was not technically a collection of short stories, but rather a series of interconnected stories woven together.

While assuredly not a household name anymore, Jean Stafford was once regarded as a writer at the top of her craft. Her debut novel Boston Adventure (the first of three novels she wrote) was a surprise bestseller and it won critical praise, though it is her short stories that have often been regarded as her crowning achievement. But if Jean Stafford is remembered for anything today, it is likely for her tempestuous, belligerent –often violent—relationship with her first husband: renowned American poet Robert Lowell. This ill-fated marriage, which mercifully ended in divorce in 1948, was a defining moment for Stafford’s life and work.

Throughout Stafford’s short stories, her distinctive voice is unmistakable –her tales are often misanthropic with depictions of small moments in life that are gradually shown to carry a far heavier burden than initially expected. Her prose is often verbose, distant, and ironic with a level of detachment that leaves readers smarting as if from a jarring experience, with elements of both comic as well as horrific motifs mixed together. That is to say, Stafford’s tales represent a rare blend of horror and humor in American literature. There is also a quality of barrenness and desolation to Stafford’s stories, they often depict sad, sardonic, devil-may-care figures who tend to face cruel caricatures of vicious people trapped in slightly farcicle situations. These are stories about spinsters and widows, orphans and intellectuals, imagined lovers and oppressive husbands, and above all, they depict people who are lonely. Some characters are despondent from their own willful reclusiveness, while others face wanton abandonment in the world. Consider, for example, the quiet suffering of a character like Polly Bay in “The Liberation.” She sits on the eastward train and thinks to herself, “How lonely I have been.” Stafford’s characters, like Polly, are isolated and alienated from the world around them. In reading Stafford’s stories, one cannot help but remark on the debt she owes to Henry James, or as Joyce Carol Oates states in her introduction to the stories, “Stafford’s characters are a wonderfully motley lot, as outsized and garrulous as cartoon bullies, as meekly repressed and virginal as the hapless observers in Henry James; adolescent girls and women who struggle to define themselves against their adversaries, and deeply-conflicted, self-lacerating women who seem to have succumbed to sexist stereotypes despite their high intelligence.”

While not generally considered a regional writer, The Collected Stories is organized into four major sections. First, “The Innocents Abroad,” which mostly features stories of Americans abroad in Europe (here, the “Daisy Miller” inheritance is quite apparent); Second, “The Bostonians, and Other Manifestations of the American scene;” Third, “Cowboys and Indians, and Magic Mountains;” and lastly, “Manhattan Island.” Each section depicts a broad geographic setting that was important at one point in the life of Jean Stafford –Europe, Boston, the Mountain West, and New York. And each story contains various autobiographical elements stitched together by Stafford.

One of the more notable stories is “The Interior Castle,” which first appeared in The Partisan Review in 1946 before it was later anthologized in The Best American Short Stories of the Century (which was edited by fellow Pulitzer Prize-winner John Updike). “The Interior Castle” offers a darkly amusing account of a woman named Pansy Vanneman who has been hospitalized and requires intensive surgery on her nose in order to breathe again after a horrid car accident which killed the cab driver. When Pansy awakens from a six-week coma, her hallucinatory mind is estranged from her situation and it becomes drawn inward as she plays little twisted games with the nurses in the hospital. She imagines her brain as a “jewel” and a “flower” and a “light in a glass” or an “envelope of rosy vellum containing envelopes, one within the other, diminishing infinitely.” Here, she closes herself off from the world in her “treasureless head.”

“Pansy, for her part, took a secret and mischievous pleasure in the bewilderment of her attendants and the more they courted her with offers of magazines, crossword puzzles, and a radio that she could rent from the hospital, the farther she retired into herself and into the world which she had created in her long hours and which no one could ever penetrate nor imagine” (182).

While undergoing surgery, she wrestles with blinding pain while also simultaneously falling in love with the surgeon, Dr. Nicholas, who packs her nose and shouts orders to remain as still as possible since he is working near her brain. “It was as if a tangle of tiny nerves were being cut dexterously, one by one; the pain writhed spirally and came to her who was a pink bird and sat on top of a cone. The pin was a pyramid made of a diamond; it was an intense light; it was the hottest fire, the coldest chill, the highest peak, the fastest force, the furthest reach, the newest time. It possessed nothing of her but one infinitesimal scene: beyond the screen as thin as gossamer, the brain trembled for its life, hearing the knives hunting like wolves outside, sniffing and snapping. Mercy! Mercy! cried the scalped nerves” (192). “The Interior Castle” was quite evidently at least partly autobiographical as Jean Stafford also underwent several debilitating painful surgeries following a car crash with her then-soon-to-be husband, Robert Lowell.

In another story, “The Hope Chest,” we meet an elderly, disgruntled, unmarried spinster version of Ebenezer Scrooge named Rhoda Bellamy who, on her eighty-second Christmas, answers a knock at the door, and promptly buys a wreath from a young boy in exchange for a kiss. She then hangs the wreath and harasses her attendant by playing a cruel joke on her. In “Caveat Emptor,” we are treated to an amusing satire of pretentious academics, Malcolm and Victoria, who teach at Alma Hettrick College for Girls, and as a result, they have become “pale from their ivory towers, myopic from reading footnotes in the oblique light of library stacks” (76). In yet another story, “The Children’s Game,” Abby Reynolds is an aging widow abroad in a Belgian casino, and “suddenly, feeling lost, she was assailed by a wild wind of homesickness and she went into the bar, almost weeping, where she ordered a glass of lemonade” (21). She realizes she has “come to belong to that group who have spent their lives leaning on someone –or being leaned on by—a father, a mother, a husband; and who, when the casket is closed or the divorce decree is final, find that they are waifs. They hide their humiliating condition –for they tend to look on loneliness as inadmissible and a little disgraceful, they tend to regard themselves as wallflowers—by playing bridge on the breezy piazzas of seaside hotels, and writing multitudinous letters, and going to lectures on the excavations of mounds and ruins in Jericho, and applying themselves with assiduity and dismay to the language of the country in which, at the moment, they find themselves” (22). A new man, Hugh Nicholson, professes his love for Abby, but she leaves him because “He was a shadow no more palpable than the phantom ships on the dim North Sea, and his voice, when he echoed her, came from an incommensurable distance” (33).

In “A Country Love Story,” a woman is married to a mentally unstable man and imagines herself a lover who is on an antique sleigh standing in the yard, constant and unchanging through the seasons. This ghostly phantom lover is reminiscent of Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw.” In “Children Are Bored On Sunday,” Stafford’s first short story to be featured in The New Yorker, we meet an insecure reclusive woman named Emma who is exploring the Metropolitan Museum of Art one day when she accidentally spots Alfred Eisenburg, a man she once flirted with at a party who floats in and out of a few high-brow New York intellectual circles. Emma rushes out of the museum onto a balcony to avoid social interaction because she now feels more like a “rube” than an intellectual, but when she learns that Alfred has actually lost his job and is going through a divorce, she suddenly desires to speak with him again. She wanders through the museum in search of him, but in disappointment and in feeling tremendously lonely, she briefly considers picking up a pay phone and dialing a random number out of desperation, but just then Alfred finds her and they decide to get a drink together. In “Life Is No Abyss,” twenty-year old Lily is scandalized when her cousin Isobel decides to live in a poorhouse as revenge on the family after being financially ruined by “the worst and most ingratiating investor who had ever lived.” The inspiration for this story came from the lyrics to a popular early 20th century song entitled “The Bluebird of Happiness” whose lyrics read as follows:

“Just remember this,
Life is no abyss,
Somewhere you’ll find the bluebird of happiness.”

Stafford’s best story in my view is “In The Zoo.” First published in The New Yorker in 1953, “In The Zoo” is bookended by two sisters who travel to the Denver Zoo where they spot a blind polar bear who reminds them of their upbringing in Adams, Colorado (this was one of three Adams stories written by Stafford). From here, we learn that the sisters –Daisy and an unnamed narrator– were orphaned and taken in by a controlling, widowed, childless woman named Mrs. Placer, who preferred to be called “Gran,” and who ran a boarding house. Gran was made the beneficiary of their father’s life insurance policy in exchange for lodging the girls. The sisters reflect upon befriending a kindly alcoholic “fighting Irish” man named Mr. Murphy who lived with a large menagerie of animals down by the railroad tracks, including a pet monkey named Shannon. However, when the girls acquired a new guard dog named “Laddy,” whom Gran called “Caesar,” the dog quickly grew violent under Gran’s watch and began attacking people, before tragically killing Mr. Murphy’s monkey, Shannon. Distraught, Mr. Murphy then poisons and kills Caesar in revenge, and “He [Mr. Murphy] withdrew from the world more and more, seldom venturing into the streets at all, except when he went to the bootlegger to get a new bottle to snuggle into. All summer, all fall, we saw him as we passed by his yard, sitting at his dilapidated table, enfeebled with gin, graying, withering, turning his head ever and ever more slowly as he maneuvered the protocol of the kings and the queens and the knaves. Daisy and I could never stop to visit him again” (300). “In the Zoo” ends as we return to the present day as the sisters watch the blind polar bear at the Denver Zoo. When it comes time for them to part ways, we realize just how much Gran’s oppressive upbringing has left them both with a paranoid suspicion of the world –in some ways, they are now forever trapped in a cage of their own paranoia, perhaps a zoo of their own. “There was no stratum of society not reeking with the effluvium of fraud and pettifoggery” (287). After it’s publication, Stafford’s “In The Zoo” won an O. Henry Prize in 1955 (which came with an accompanying $300 financial award).

There were many other stories in this collection that I chose not to mention here for brevity’s sake, but in my view I have covered the major works and “In The Zoo” still shines as the best of the bunch.  

*****

Throughout my chronological survey of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novels, I have thus far traversed both peaks and valleys, and sometimes those valleys have felt more like long wandering sojourns in the desert. While Jean Stafford’s short stories aren’t among those truly nauseating Pulitzer Pulitzer-winners, this collection is certainly not among the best in my view. Jean Stafford’s collected stories as a whole demonstrate an undeniable mastery of the craft of short story-writing, her tales tend to portray haunting vignettes of ordinary life, often beginning with the invocation of a particular image or scene only to gradually peel away the layers and reveal a much greater ocean of depth than we had initially expected. There is indeed richness to these tales. In Newsweek, Pete Axthelm wrote that Stafford’s stories would become a textbook for many students of short fiction. “She can,” he said, “teach almost anything one could want to know about swiftly developing characters, balancing them in delicate counterpoint or wrenching conflict and probing their emotions.” Additionally, Joyce Carol Oates argued that Stafford should be ranked among the “most versatile” of the great American short story writers of her era, among whom included Eudora Welty, Peter Taylor, John Cheever, Katherine Anne Porter, and Flannery O’Connor. Oates further hit the nail on the head when she wrote that Stafford’s voice is “jarringly jocular” and filled with “doomsday revelations.” Most of Stafford’s characters are “probably homesick” but realize they can never go back. And this is a theme that remains constant throughout her stories.

With all of this in mind, The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford did not exactly strike a chord with me. While reading this nearly 500-page collection, I struggled to find satisfaction amidst all the quirky, intellectual, unloved, sorrowful, neglected, awkward loners who comprise Stafford’s protagonists. A few of the stories were indeed powerful, like “Children Are Bored On Sunday” and “In The Zoo,” but I hesitate to say that many of the others are somewhat bland and too forgettable for my taste. Perhaps I will boomerang back to Jean Stafford again in the future, but I really don’t relish doing so.    

On the 1970 Pulitzer Prize Decision

The year 1970 faced another somewhat controversial Pulitzer Prize decision. The Fiction jury had selected a top contender with them by Joyce Carol Oates –“In the words of one juror, them is a combination of American dream and American nightmare. Miss Oates has Dreiser’s understanding of our society and much of his strength but she writes better.” Regarding Jean Stafford, Fiction jury chair John Barkham declared the following in his jury report submitted to John Hohenberg: “Her range in subject, scene, and mood is remarkable, and her mastery of the short story form is everywhere manifest. She is wonderfully skilled in digging out drama where others would see only drabness. She builds to strong climaxes with the littlest of steps. In short, a gifted writer, secure in her technique, who prefers the miniature to the mural.”

Nevertheless, the Pulitzer Board decided to reject Joyce Carol Oates’s them (one of many Pulitzer snubs for Joyce Carol Oates over the years) in favor of the jury’s “first runner-up,” Jean Stafford’s Collected Stories. The other runner-up selected by the jury was a short story collection by Peter Taylor. While Joyce Carol Oates did go on to win the National Book Award in 1970 for them, she later somewhat ironically wrote the introduction to Stafford’s short story collection, despite narrowly losing the Pulitzer Prize to her. Oates’s introduction is now featured at the beginning of the newly re-published edition of Stafford’s stories (2021). Years after the 1970 decision, former Pulitzer Prize Administrator John Hohenberg chalked up the Joyce Carol Oates’s snub to a lackluster jury report submitted to the Board: “It cannot be said that fiction in 1969 recovered from the ground it has lost to nonfiction in recent years. The general standard of the entries impressed us as good but far from epochal, technically competent, with themes and styles suitably varied. All too many, however, substituted sophistication for vitality.”

Other books under consideration by the jury in 1970 included Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth “which was greeted with extravagant praise and became an instant best seller. The uproar has long since died down, and it is now possible to see the book as an overwritten novella, hilarious in spots, but less substantial than Roth’s own Goodbye Columbus.” The jury also considered Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, though in the words of one juror, it was considered “too long, far too cryptic, a case of self-indulgence overwhelming art,” and it was compared to James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. The jury also mentioned a few young writers as potential future Pulitzer Prize-winners: John Gardner (Fat City), Julian Moynihan (Pairing Off), L. Woiwode (What I’m Going To Do, I Think), Sumner Locke Elliott (Edens Lost), Richard Mairus (The Coming of Rain), and Frieda Arkin (The Dorp). Additionally, the Board looked closely at John Cheever’s Bullet Park before landing on Jean Stafford as the winner.

The three members of the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction jury were:

  • John Barkham (1908-1998) was originally born in South Africa on an ostrich farm, before later migrating to the United States where he became a historical book reviewer, focusing primarily on books about Africa. According to his obituary in The New York Times, in his heyday, Mr. Barkham could deliver a stream of 4-6 book reviews per week. He would typically sit back in his Eames leather reading chair at 3pm, and once finished reading, he would handwrite his review of the book before typing it up again on his typewriter. His writing appeared in numerous publications including TIME, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Post and others. Mr. Barkham served on many Pulitzer juries in the categories of Fiction, Nonfiction, and Biography over a period of approximately 20 years.
  • John Brooks (1920-1993) was a long-time staff writer at The New Yorker. He was often perceived as a contrarian voice, He penned several books, both fiction and nonfiction, which were bestsellers primarily focused on financial speculation in the 1980s and the bull market of the 1960s, earning him three Gerald Loeb Awards. Brooks was president of the Authors Guild from 1975 to 1979, and with John Hersey, he was instrumental in creating a recommended book contract for authors. He served as vice president of PEN from 1962 to 1966, was vice president of the Society of American Historians in 1984, and was a trustee of the New York Public Library from 1978 to 1994.He was married twice and had two children. He died of a stroke in New York in 1993.
  • William Garland “W.G.” Rogers (1896-1978) was a long-serving literary, music, and art editor of The Associated Press, retiring in 1961. He began his newspaper career in 1931 on The Springfield (Mass.) Union, joined The Associated Press as a reporter in 1943 and became a critic in 1945. He also reviewed books for The New York Times, the Saturday Review, the Saturday Review Syndicate, The New York Herald Tribune and The New York Post. Rogers published twelve books throughout his career, and died at the age of 82 in 1978. He left behind no immediate survivors.

According to John Hohenberg, upon winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Jean Stafford was said to be most pleased when she heard Walter Cronkite’s announcement of her name on the news.

Lastly, the 1970 The New York Times Pulitzer Prize announcement read: “In the arts and letters section, the judges appeared to be aware of what’s new, as the prizes to Charles Wuorinen for his composition of electronic music and to Charles Gordone for his play, ‘No Place to Be Somebody,’ indicate. It is especially pleasing to us to see the prize for criticism—the first time it has been awarded—go to Ada Louise Huxtable, The Times’s architecture critic, who has brought a sharp, analytic eye to a field that sorely needs just that. Richard Howard’s dramatic portraits in his book, ‘Untitled Subjects,’ gracefully and finely wrought, are a change from the current style of confessional poetry. And if Jean Stafford’s stories are more traditional than adventuresome, they are surely among the best of their kind being written today.” Aside from the Fiction prize, in 1970 Charles Gordone became the first black dramatist to win the Pulitzer Prize, and Seymour “Sy” Hersh won a prize for “International reporting” for his celebrated expose of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam via the Dispatch News Service.

Who is Jean Stafford?

Jean Stafford (1915-1979) was born in Covina, California (a city in the San Gabriel Valley), though she primarily grew up in Boulder, Colorado. The youngest of four children, her father John Richard Stafford wrote Westerns in the early part of his career under a couple nom de plumes “Jack Wonder” and “Ben Delight.” He apparently spent his later years squirreled away in his basement, slightly paranoid, writing a book about debt that was never actually completed.

Jean Stafford attended the University of Colorado Boulder and received a one-year fellowship to study philology at the University of Heidelberg from 1936-1937. However, repelled by the rise of Hitler in Germany, she soon returned home. She then taught a course on Communications at Stevens College in Missouri before relocating to Boston. Stafford first arrived in Boston with an unfinished novel she had been working on for about four years and when it was finally published (she was twenty-eight years old in 1944), Boston Adventure, became a surprise bestseller. According to The New York Times, Boston Adventure was a retelling of classic tale of “Cinderella.” According to NPR: “Stafford’s debut, is like Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, a raw depiction of female isolation. The novel’s shrewd and tough main character, Sonia Marburg, is just entering adolescence when the story opens. With her miserable Russian- and German-immigrant parents, Sonia lives in a shack in a fishing village across the bay from Boston. In summertime, Sonia works with her mother as a chambermaid at a nearby hotel where she idolizes a wealthy guest named Miss Pride. Sonia’s father deserts the family and her mother is packed off to a sanitarium after a bizarre wintertime excursion to the shuttered hotel, where she spends the night picking lint out of wicker chairs. Left alone, Sonia leaps at Miss Pride’s invitation to move into her Beacon Hill mansion and be trained as a personal secretary. Ruminations like this one led early reviewers to compare Stafford’s writing to that of Henry James and Marcel Proust. Like those masters of interiority and verbosity, Stafford could also take her sweet time telling a story.”

Throughout her career, she published two additional novels: The Mountain Lion (1947) and The Catherine Wheel (1952), but her short stories would earn her lasting literary repute, the collection won her the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1970. Previously, she had won an O. Henry Award in 1955 for her story “In the Zoo.” She later briefly served on the faculty at Wesleyan University (1964-1965). Over the years, she contributed short stories to a wide range of magazines including Kenyon Review, Partisan Review, Harper’s Bazaar, and most notably The New Yorker.

For much of her life, Stafford lived in the Hamptons, writing in an attic. She was married three times, first in 1940 to the tempestuous, manic, alcoholic American poet Robert Lowell, who dedicated “Lord Weary’s Castle” to her. They met through Ford Madox Ford at a conference (Allen Tate serves as best man at their wedding). Stafford later told a friend that Lowell was akin to a “psychopathic murderer-poet.” Indeed, he did almost kill her once in 1938 (before they were married) during a drunken car crash. Lowell managed to escape the accident unscathed but Stafford was not so lucky. She sustained a crushed nose and cheekbone which required five operations on her face and skull. And this wasn’t the only incident of violent –Lowell later broke her nose at least two more times, and reportedly attempted strangulation of her at one point. Stafford later wrote to a friend that “he [Lowell] does what I have always needed to have done to me and that is that he dominates me.” When Lowell left her for another woman, Stafford was hospitalized for nearly a year, suffering from alcoholism and depression. Suffice it so say this was a catastrophic union.

Stafford married two more times in her lifetime, but Lowell reportedly remained at the center of her consciousness. Her next husband was Life Magazine staff writer Oliver Jensen and her third husband was A.J. Liebling, a columnist for The New Yorker. Throughout her life and career, Stafford suffered from bouts of alcoholism, depression, and pulmonary disease until the age of sixty-three she had stopped eating and died of cardiac arrest. She died in 1979 at the Burke Rehabilitation Center in White Plains, NY. She was cremated with her ashes placed in Green River Cemetery in East Hampton next to the body of her third husband, A.J. Liebling. She was survived by two sisters but never had any children. At her death, she left behind an uncompleted novel which has never been published entitled The Parliament of Women.

In 2019, forty years after her death, The New York Times ran a profile of Jean Stafford in honor of the new Library of America edition of her three novels (this edition was edited by Kathryn Davis). In the profile Parul Sehgal wrote: “She [Stafford] remained steadfast; in a life dogged by alcoholism and ill health, appalling husbands and, admittedly, a fair amount of chaos of her own making, her prose never lost its force, sheen or sour majesty.” Three biographies of Stafford have been published since her death 1979, but, over the past several decades, she has been most prominently been featured in biographies about her ex-husband, Robert Lowell.

Film Adaptations:

  • In 1952, Stafford’s short story “Hope Chest” was adapted into a 30-minute-long film starring Florence Bates.
  • In 1982, Stafford’s short story entitled “The Scarlet Letter” was also adapted into a 30-minute-long television film starring Christian Slater and Virgil Meade.

Literary Context in 1965-1966:

  • Nobel Prize for Literature (1970): Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn “for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature.”
  • National Book Award Winner (1970): them by Joyce Carol Oates.
  • Booker Prize Winner (1970): The Elected Member by Bernice Rubens.
  • Per Publisher’s Weekly, the #1 bestseller in 1969 was Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth. Other books on the list included The Godfather by Mario Puzo, The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton, The Promise by Chaim Potok, and The House on the Strand by Daphne du Maurier.
  • After 147 years, the final issue of The Saturday Evening Post appeared in the United States.
  • I Sing the Body Electric by Ray Bradbury was published.
  • Hallowe’en Party by Agatha Christie was published.
  • Ubik by Philip K. Dick was published.
  • Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert was published.
  • The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin was published.
  • Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos by H.P. Lovecraft was published.
  • Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian was published.
  • The Godfather by Mario Puzo was published.
  • Conversation in the Cathedral by Mario Vargas Llosa was published.
  • Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut was published.
  • The Seven Minutes by Irving Wallace was published.

My Assessment:

Did the right book win the Pulitzer Prize in 1970? As stated above, in my view The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford is not exactly a high-water mark for the Pulitzer Prize. Jean Stafford still has her defenders today, and she is surely a unique writer, but her stories are simply not to my taste. With that being said, there are definitely worse Pulitzer Prize-winners than The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford, but my sense is that Joyce Carol Oates’s them would likely have made for a more fitting selection for the prize. In 1969, there were several highly lauded science fiction novels published, and arguably Kurt Vonnegut’s magnum opus Slaughterhouse-Five falls into that category, but since the Pulitzer Prize generally does not consider works of genre fiction, these books were ineligible. Thus, I know of no stand-out alternative in place of The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford aside from possibly the jury’s initial selection of them by Joyce Carol Oates.

Stafford, Jean. The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, NY, NY, (1969, republished in 2005 with an introduction by Joyce Carol Oates).

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