"Miss Stafford writes with brilliance. Scene after scene is told with unforgettable care and tenuous entanglements are treated with wise subtlety. She creates a splendid sense of time, of the unending afternoons of youth, and of the actual color of noon and of night. Refinement of evil, denial of drama only make the underlying truth more terrible." --Saturday Review "Hard to match . . . for subtlety and understanding. . . written wittily, lucidly, and with great respect for the resources of the language. "--New Yorker Coming of age in pre-World War II California and Colorado brings tragedy to Molly and Ralph Fawcett in Jean Stafford's classic semi-autobiographical novel, first published in 1947. Torn between their mother's world of genteel respectability and their grandfather's and uncle's world of cowboy masculinity, neither Molly nor Ralph can find an acceptable adult role to aspire to. As events move to their swift and inevitable conclusion, Stafford uncovers and indicts the social forces that require boys to sacrifice the feminine in order to become men and doom intelligent girls who aren't pretty.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
Miss Stafford writes with brilliance. Scene after scene is told with unforgettable care and tenuous entanglements are treated with wise subtlety. She creates a splendid sense of time, of the unending afternoons of youth, and of the actual color of noon and of night. Refinement of evil, denial of drama only make the underlying truth more terrible. (Saturday Review )
Hard to match . . . for subtlety and understanding. . . written wittily, lucidly, and with great respect for the resources of the language. (New Yorker )
Hard to match . . . for subtlety and understanding. . . written wittily, lucidly, and with great respect for the resources of the language. (New Yorker )
About the Author
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. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
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. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Jean Stafford's "Olympian detachment",
By
This review is from: The Mountain Lion (A Zia Book) (Paperback)
Jean Stafford is primarily known today (if at all) for her marriages to Robert Lowell and A. J. Liebling and for her short stories, most of which were originally published in The New Yorker and gathered in an anthology that earned her the Pulitzer Prize in 1970. But she also wrote three novels, including "The Mountain Lion" (1947), which is considered by many critics and writers to be her best.
Tracing the lives of a brother and sister after they had been incapacitated by scarlet fever, the novel's underlying heartbreak creeps up on you. Because of their infirmity (and frequent nosebleeds that excuse them from school), the children are outcasts among their playmates, and they find refuge in each other's company. These early pages exhibit a comic warmth that is, it turns out, illusory. Two events--the sudden death of their grandfather (an episode somehow both macabre and offbeat) and an extended stay at an uncle's ranch in Colorado--alter their lives and, eventually, their shared bond. Molly revels in her role as a misfit ("I know I'm ugly. I know everyone hates me. I wish I were dead."), and she finds refuge in her books, while Ralph thrives in the outdoors and on the ranch, and he becomes his uncle's constant companion and good-natured rival in their hunt for a local mountain lion they'd spotted in the hills. But Ralph's entry into adolescence makes him "wild with all sorts of angers and with an anxiety he could not name." "Sometimes he loathed his physical being for the alterations that were taking place in it." This is all standard stuff for a coming-of-age novel, but what sets "The Mountain Lion" above the rest are the intricacy of Stafford's prose and her subtle depiction of the deterioration of the attachment between these two siblings. The perspective alternates between them as the chasm--both physical and emotional--widens, until an imprudent and suggestive comment by Ralph to his sister sits awkwardly between them. Still, their rivalry and spats and embarrassments and discomfiture are not much worse than those endured by most brothers and sisters--but an unexpected and shocking incident makes reconciliation between them impossible. While a tragedy, the novel is both charming and funny in turns; stylistically, the novel recalls Carson McCullers' better work or even the more subdued grotesqueries of Eudora Welty's "The Ponder Heart." What Joyce Carol Oates has called Stafford's "Olympian detachment" suggests "painful intimacy" while avoiding sentimentality; it's a novel that will haunt the reader long after its abrupt finale.
11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Stafford offers a unique spin to the tradional hero.,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Mountain Lion (A Zia Book) (Paperback)
This novel is about the coming of age of a brother, Ralph, and a sister, Molly. Even though Molly is a bright, young female who aspires to be a writer, she considers herself a long wooden box with a mind inside. While Molly and Ralph visit their Uncle Claude and grandfather, their mother takes their two older sisters around the world in preparation for marrialge. Molly spends the summer imitating Ralph because she does not have anyone else to act as her mentor. When Ralph asks her what dirty words she knows, his name, too, is added to the list of "unforgivables." Molly's presence inhibits Ralph's male maturation. Therefore, the hunt for the mountain lion translates into a form of salvation for future Molly's as well as for Ralph. This novel is rich with symbolism. An appropriate novel for the secondary classroom that highlights such subjects as feminism, anorexia, and dysfunction in the family.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I was captivated,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: The Mountain Lion (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)
I am constantly amazed at the caliber of books New York Review Books Classics finds to reprint, and "The Mountain Lion" didn't disappointment. For me, the book was all about the dualities of life: California versus Colorado, the city versus the wilderness, civilization and nature, childhood and adulthood, life and death. All of this is bolsterd by Stafford's writing style, or rather two styles, which further reinforce the conflicts within the story. And, just when I thought I had everything figured out, the ending blew me away. This was not necessarily an easy read emotionally, but well worth the time.
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