A Mother in History
May 2021 · Library of America
Ebook
50
Pages
Tools
info
family_home
Eligible
info
About this ebook
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.
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.
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 M...
Discover more
About the author
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.
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 ...
Rate this ebook
Tell us what you think.
Reading information
Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.
