Jean Stafford

A Mother in History (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Jean Stafford's unforgettable portrait of Marguerite Oswald, the mother of Lee Harvey Oswald. Curious about "the influences and accidents and loves and antipathies and idiosyncrasies" that shaped Lee Harvey Oswald, the novelist and short story writer Jean Stafford spent nine hours interviewing Marguerite Oswald in May 1965. A Mother in History (1966) is the acerbic result, an indelible portrait of a woman hungry for money, fame, and attention, full of righteous self-pity, and relentless in professing her son's blamelessness: "Killing does not necessarily mean badness. You find killing in some very fine homes for one reason or another." Stafford's controversial profile elicited mixed reviews-Newsweek praised it as a "masterpiece of character study," while Time called it "the most abrasively unpleasant book in recent years"-and angry readers accused her of seeking to "enthrone a wicked woman" and "demolish the sacred throne of motherhood." It captures a moment in history when the trauma of Dallas was still raw, Lee Harvey Oswald's guilt was widely accepted, and Marguerite Oswald, with her obsessive "research" into hidden "truths" and the machinations of an omnipresent "they," appeared to be a singular prisoner of maternal delusion, and not a harbinger of the decades to come.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Library of America
• Seitenzahl: 50
• Erscheinungstermin: 4. Mai 2021
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781598536959
• Artikelnr.: 61463105

Autorenporträt

Jean Stafford (1915-1979) was born on a walnut ranch in Covina, California, and moved with her family to Colorado after her father lost most of his money in the stock market. She graduated from the University of Colorado in 1936, studied in Heidelberg for a year, taught in Missouri and Iowa, and then went to the Northeast and began to write full time. Stafford published three novels, Boston Adventure (1944), The Mountain Lion (1947), The Catherine Wheel (1952), more than forty short stories (The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1970), and A Mother in History (1966), a journalistic profile of Marguerite Oswald. She was married three times, to the poet Robert Lowell, 1940-48, to the magazine editor Oliver Jensen, 1950-53, and to The New Yorker writer A.J. Liebling from 1959 until his death in 1963.