Shirley Jackson was born in San Francisco in 1916. When her short story ‘The Lottery’ was published in The New Yorker in 1948, readers were so horrified they sent her hate mail; it has since become one of the most iconic American stories of all time. Her first novel, The Road Through the Wall, was published in the same year and was followed by five more: Hangsaman, The Bird’s Nest, The Sundial, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, widely seen as her masterpiece. Just an Ordinary Day and Let Me Tell You, collections of stories, essays and other writings, were both published posthumously. In addition to her dark, brilliant novels and short stories, she wrote two humorous memoirs about family life in Vermont with her four children and her husband, the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman. Shirley Jackson died in her sleep in 1965 at the age of forty-eight.