In The Zoo
In the Zoo
Jean Stafford
1953
Jean Stafford was a post - World War II American author whose fiction remained within the realist and symbolist traditions dating back to the nineteenth century. Influential in the high literary society of her time, Stafford was married to the poet Robert Lowell for six years and then married to two other men. She never forgot her rural Western roots and difficult childhood, however, and themes from her younger life continually reappear in her writings. One such story, entitled "In the Zoo," is a psychological portrait of two orphans remembering their traumatic childhood in a small Rocky Mountain town.
Stafford published "In the Zoo" in 1953, as the ...
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use of symbolism -- particularly the animals that represent various people and themes from the sisters' childhood -- and its striking, moving climax, which occurs when Gran turns the sisters' puppy into an attack dog and lets it kill Mr. Murphy's monkey. Through these techniques, Stafford comments on themes of psychological trauma, confinement, and the nature of love and companionship. "In the Zoo" is now available in The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford (1969), which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1970.
Author Biography
Born in the rural Californian town of Covina in 1915, Stafford was the youngest child of four. Her father was a fiction writer who lost his fortune in the stock market while living in San Diego in 1920, at which point the family moved to Colorado and struggled to live on the income from the children's jobs, allowances from their family, and the income Stafford's mother collected from taking sorority girls as boarders in their home. Stafford attended the University ...
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and collections. From 1959 until his death in 1963, she was married to the New Yorker columnist A. J. Liebling. In 1969, she published The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford, which won a Pulitzer Prize. By this time, however, she had stopped writing fiction, concentrating instead on reviews, articles, and essays. Biographers have speculated a variety of reasons for this shift, ranging from Stafford's health problems and heavy drinking to her desire to keep to the realistic style of writing that was no longer the dominant form in the 1960s. Stafford spent the final fifteen years of her life in relative seclusion at her home in eastern Long Island, dying of complications following a ...
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In The Zoo. (2015, December 7). Retrieved December 23, 2024, from http://www.essayworld.com/essays/In-The-Zoo/105251
"In The Zoo." Essayworld.com. Essayworld.com, 7 Dec. 2015. Web. 23 Dec. 2024. <http://www.essayworld.com/essays/In-The-Zoo/105251>
"In The Zoo." Essayworld.com. December 7, 2015. Accessed December 23, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/In-The-Zoo/105251.
"In The Zoo." Essayworld.com. December 7, 2015. Accessed December 23, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/In-The-Zoo/105251.
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