Within the basic setting of the period immediately preceding and following World War II, a period marked by cultural dissolution, mindless violence, and individual isolation, she presents the survival of inflexible, inexorable cultural modes of experience which restrict, confine, and destroy the individual. A Westerner by birth and upbringing, Stafford identifies her fiction with that of Twain and James both in their firm sense of place and in their portrayal of the dislocation of innocence. Her major themes are the common search for self-survival in an alien, and often hostile, culture and the inordinate price which the individual must pay for a small measure of freedom and knowledge. With brilliant irony she depicts a capitalistic society where the market is rigged, where the greatest price must be paid for the smallest measure by those who choose the cultural values of self-sacrifice and abnegation over the human ones of affirmation and knowledge of the self.
All the figures of Stafford's imagination--her major themes, character types, method, and style-- are fully presented in her first novel, Boston Adventure (1944). The critical response to this novel was typical of that to all her novels. Although favorably received, in general, as being one of the best first novels of the decade, it was considered in some sense alien, not really a novel.
