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. "Stafford's unusual, intense novel about a brother and sister who spend a fateful summer on their uncle's ranch in Colorado has never been forgotten by anyone who's read it since its publication in 1947. This handsome new paperback edition from New York Review Books includes Stafford's 1971 author's note and an afterword by Kathryn Davis." — The Oregonian “Stafford is one of the 20th century’s most undervalued writers...in masterful short stories and especially her second and greatest novel, she managed an American miracle: combining Jamesian psychological depth and style—at once lapidary and viscous, like see-through molasses—with Mark Twain’s backwoods wildness and humor.” —Garth Greenwell, The Atlantic The Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years  "How could it be that Jean Stafford has vanished from view, remembered more for her marriages to Robert Lowell and A.J. Liebling than her considerable accomplishments as a writer? Her 1970 Pulitzer Prize for "Collected Stories" was apparently no inoculation from the vagaries of literary fashion, and perhaps after languishing in out-of-print no man's land, this edition of "The Mountain Lion" will win Stafford new legions of readers. The novel, which appeared in 1947, is in many ways a coming-of-age story, centering on a precocious brother and sister who spend their summers at their uncle's Colorado ranch. Sounds simple enough, but Stafford's world is eerie and chilling -- though emotionally red hot, as boy and girl chafe against their suburban, silk-and-sherry life and yet find the freedom of the frontier, and the prospect of adulthood, almost impossible to bear." —Elizabeth Taylor, The Chicago Tribune "Stafford has a dry desert style — you feel the stillness and the heat in her writing, the swish of palm trees, voices of children, the sounds of sweeping beneath walnut trees, the whir of hummingbirds...Stafford can write a real nightmare, the kind in which everything looks ominous, words cause permanent scars and a character's one shot at happiness is dashed by his very own hands." — The Los Angeles Times “If not the best novel of the 1940s, The Mountain Lion is a very fine book indeed, a classic of childhood rage and bewilderment told in a superbly controlled colloquial prose." —Elaine Showalter “A mature and wise novel, a novel so utterly different from her first that it is evident she need never imitate herself, as young novelists too often do after an early success. Written with simplicity and often with astonishing power… The Mountain Lion is likely to beguile many a reader into thinking that he has hold of merely a shrewdly perspective and amusing novel of children, when what he really has in his hand is a charge of psychological dynamite.” —Joseph Henry Jackson, San Francisco Chronicle “ Like Flaubert and Eudora Welty, Miss Stafford is a master of making the objects in a room exhibit a dumb and eloquent presence… The Mountain Lion is one of the best novels about adolescence in American literature.” —Guy Davenport, The New York Times “It's a terrific book, witty and smart as Stafford always was, and kind in its treatment of these two strangely irresistible children.” —Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post “A subtly and brilliantly realized tragedy of adolescence” —Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times Book Review A “wonderful record of childhood and adolescence…I do not know where to turn in contemporary fiction for a more wonderful recording of the sights and smells, the emotions and values, the hates and passions of childhood and youth…[a] beautifully modeled tale.” —Howard Mumford Jones , The New York Times “a delicate, sharp story of childhood and adolescence. ” —Time magazine “ The Mountain Lion has all the form, design and sever selectivity of a controlled and conscious work of art. Its characters are painfully real, interesting as individuals and significant as representatives of various attitudes toward life.” —Orville Pres