In a period of social upheaval she presented the survival of inflexible, inexorable cultural modes of experience that restrict, confine, and destroy the individual. The critical response to Stafford's fiction has also been within the conventions of the realistic tradition; the standard critical readings of her work are historical and biographical. Her contribution to American letters is in the truths she has told--about the lives of women and about the West--and in the sureness of the telling.
Jean Stafford was born on 1 July 1915 in rural Covina, California, the fourth and youngest child of John Richard and Ethel McKillop Stafford. Her father, a classics major in college, was a writer of western stories within the tradition of frontier adventure and humor. At the age of twenty-five he inherited a fortune substantial enough to enable him to retire to the family farm in London, Missouri; marry; and devote his time to writing fiction. In 1910, after eleven years of writing, he had published some short stories and one novel, When Cattle Kingdom Fell.
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