Which 1970 Pulitzer-winning book is a collection by Jean Stafford?

The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The volume is a major retrospective collection of Stafford’s short fiction, rather than one of her individual novels.

Published in 1969 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, the book gathers stories from earlier collections, including Children Are Bored on Sunday and Bad Characters. Stafford arranged the pieces largely by setting or locale instead of presenting them in the order in which they were first published. That structure gives the collection a broad portrait of American social life.

The alternative titles are especially tempting because Children Are Bored on Sunday and Bad Characters are both real Stafford collections represented in the volume. The award therefore belongs to the larger collected volume, not to either earlier book. Fourteen stories first published in periodicals had not previously appeared in a collection.