WHB August Book Club: The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford

Join us for a discussion of Jean Stafford's devastating 1947 novel, , at Womb House Books.

Become a sustaining member and receive the monthly book club pick with love letter and critical packet, 15% off online and in shop, and free admission to author events.

Eight-year-old Molly and her ten-year-old brother Ralph are inseparable, in league with each other against the stodgy and stupid routines of school and daily life; against their prim mother and prissy older sisters; against the world of authority and perhaps the world itself. One summer they are sent from the genteel Los Angeles suburb that is their home to backcountry Colorado, where their uncle Claude has a ranch. There the children encounter an enchanting new world—savage, direct, beautiful, untamed—to which, over the next few years, they will return regularly, enjoying a delicious double life. And yet at the same time this other sphere, about which they are both so passionate, threatens to come between their passionate attachment to each other. Molly dreams of growing up to be a writer, yet clings ever more fiercely to the special world of childhood. Ralph for his part feels the growing challenge, and appeal, of impending manhood. Youth and innocence are hurtling toward a devastating end.

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 BA and an MA 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. Following her graduation, Stafford spent a year abroad studying philology at the University of Heidelberg, and 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, which became a best seller, and in 1947 The Mountain Lion, her most highly acclaimed book. Stafford was also a gifted writer of short stories, and by 1948, the year in which she received a Guggenheim fellowship, her work was regularly appearing in The New Yorker. Divorced from Lowell in 1948, Stafford remarried twice—to Life editor Oliver Jensen and to the writer A. J. Liebling. 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. She suffered a stroke in 1976 and died three years later in White Plains, New York, leaving her entire estate to her cleaning woman.