The Mountain Lion

Jean Stafford (1915–1979) was born in Covina, California, the youngest of four children. When she was five her father, an unsuccessful writer of Westerns, lost the bulk of his inherited fortune on the stock exchange. The impoverished family, forced to move, eventually resettled in Boulder, Colorado. Stafford excelled as a student, earning both a B.A. and an M.A. in four years on a scholarship at the University of Colorado, but her college years were marked by poverty as well as by the suicide of her friend Lucy McKee, who shot herself in Stafford’s presence. A fellowship from the University of Heidelberg enabled Stafford to study philology abroad following her graduation. Shortly after her return she met the poet Robert Lowell, whom she married in New York City in 1940. In 1944 she published her first book,  Boston Adventure , a best selling novel of manners, and her second and most highly acclaimed novel,  The Mountain Lion , followed in 1947—years which also brought the collapse of her marriage to Lowell and a stay in a psychiatric hospital. Stafford began to write short stories, and by 1948, the year in which she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, her work was regularly appearing in  The New Yorker . In 1952 Stafford published a third novel,  The Catherine Wheel , and in 1970 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her  Collected Stories . Stafford was married twice more—to  Life  editor Oliver Jensen and to the writer A. J. Liebling—but lived out her last fifteen years alone. She suffered a stroke in 1976 and died three years later in White Plains, New York, leaving her entire estate to her cleaning woman. Kathryn Davis is the author of many novels, including  Labrador , The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf ,  Hell ,  The Walking Tour ,  The Thin Place , and  Versailles . She is the recipient of Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2006 Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis and lives in Vermont. 

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