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Shirley Jackson

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Shirley Jackson (December 14, 1916 – August 8, 1965) was an American author who wrote short stories and novels. Her most famous works are her short story The Lottery (1948), which combines a bucolic, small-town America setting with a horrific shock ending, and the novel The Haunting of Hill House (1959), an update of the classic ghost story to a contemporary setting. The tone of much of her work is odd and macabre, with an impending sense of doom, often framed by very ordinary settings and characters.

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Life and work

Born in San Francisco, she graduated with a BA from Syracuse University in 1940. While a student there, she met future husband Stanley Edgar Hyman, who was to become a noted literary critic. For Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Harcraft's Twentieth Century Authors (1954), she wrote:

I very much dislike writing about myself or my work, and when pressed for autobiographical material can only give a bare chronological outline which contains, naturally, no pertinent facts. I was born in San Francisco in 1919 and spent most of my early life in California. I was married in 1940 to Stanley Edgar Hyman, critic and numismatist, and we live in Vermont, in a quiet rural community with fine scenery and comfortably far away from city life. Our major exports are books and children, both of which we produce in abundance. The children are Laurence, Joanne, Sarah and Barry: my books include three novels, The Road Through The Wall, Hangsaman, The Bird's Nest and a collection of short stories, The Lottery. Life Among the Savages is a disrespectful memoir of my children.
Although Jackson claimed to have been born in 1919 in order to appear younger than her husband, biographer Judy Oppenheimer has determined that she was actually born in 1916.' In addition to her adult literary novels, Jackson also wrote a children's novel, Nine Magic Wishes, available in an edition illustrated by her grandson, Miles Hyman. In a series of short stories, later collected in the books Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons, she wrote about (a fictionalized version of) her marriage and the experience of bringing up four children. These stories present a strong contrast with her better known work, and pioneered the "true-to-life funny-housewife stories" popularized in the 1950s and '60s by such writers as Jean Kerr and Erma Bombeck.

After Jackson's death, her husband released a posthumous volume of her work, Come Along With Me, containing several chapters of her unfinished last novel as well as several rare short stories (among them "Louisa, Please Come Home") and three speeches given by Jackson in her writing seminars.

Magazines

In 1938, while she was studying at Syracuse, her first published story, "Janice," appeared, and the stories that followed were published in Collier's, Good Housekeeping, Harper's, Mademoiselle, the New Republic, The New Yorker, Woman's Day, Woman's Home Companion and other magazines.

In 1996, a crate of unpublished stories was found in the barn behind Jackson's house. The best of those stories, along with previously uncollected stories from various magazines, were published in the 1996 collection, Just an Ordinary Day. The title was taken from one of her stories for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, "One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts." A large number of Ms. Jackson's papers are available in the Library of Congress, and a critical essay on her work can be found in S. T. Joshi's book The Modern Weird Tale (2001).

Listen to

Awards

Novels

Short stories

References

External links

 

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