The publication of this novel marked the high point of his literary career. In 1911 he moved with his wife and children to California.
As a young child Stafford lived a life of solid, middle-class comfort. When she was five, her father sold the walnut farm in Covina and moved to San Diego to be nearer the stock market. In less than a year he had lost his entire fortune and moved the family to Colorado. Although the family had financial difficulties (reduced to surviving on legacies and allowances from their families, income generated by Ethel Stafford, who took in college students as boarders, and the earnings of the Stafford children), Stafford's father devoted his time to writing western fiction and economic treatises on the iniquities of the stock market.
Jean Stafford attended the University of Colorado on a scholarship. Majoring in English literature, in 1936 she graduated cum laude, the only student in her class to be awarded both a B.A. and an M.A. Upon receipt of a fellowship from the German government, she traveled to Europe to study philology at the University of Heidelberg. In the summer of 1937 she met Robert Lowell, an aspiring poet and member of the prominent New England Lowell family, at the Boulder Writers' Conference.
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