The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford

This collection represents the best of Jean Stafford's singular contribution to the art of the short story.

It is well known that Miss Stafford started her writing career in Colorado, but it is not generally known that writing is in her blood. As she reveals in the preface, "By the time I knew him, my father was writing Western stories under the nom de plume, Jack Wonder, or occasionally, Ben Delight. But before that, before I was born, he wrote under his own name and he published a novel called When Cattle Kingdom Fell."

This is not a "selected" volume because it contains most of Miss Stafford's work in this form, not "complete" because it omits the novella, A Winder's Tale, and some stories. The thirty stories here range in time from "The Darkening Moon" and "The Lippia Lawn" of 1944 to "The Philosophy Lesson" of 1968. Miss Stafford has grouped them geographically. Among the stories set in Europe (under the heading "The Innocents Abroad") are "A Modest Proposal," "The echo and the Nemesis," and "Maggie Meriwether's Rich Experience." The section entitled "Bostonians and Other Manifestations of the American Scene" contains "Life Is No Abyss, " a small masterpiece previously uncollected: "A Country Love Story," "The Interior Castle," and "The Bleeding Heart." In the Western section *"Cowboys and Indians") are "The Healthiest Girl in Town," "The Mountain Day," and "In the Zoo." The seven stories in the New York section ("Manhattan Island") include "Children Are Bored on Sunday," "Between the Porch and the Altar," and "The End of a Career."

"My roots remain in the semi-fictitious town of Adams, Colorado," Miss Stafford writes, "although the rest of me may abide in the South or the Midwest or New England or New York. Most of the people in these stories are away from home, too, and while they are probably homesick, they won't go back."