SHIRLEY JACKSON, WHOSE SHORT STORY “THE LOTTERY” FIRMLY established her as a master of the American short story, was born in San Francisco on December 14, 1916. She grew up in the affluent suburb of Burlingame, California, a community whose prejudice and wickedness Jackson savaged in her first novel, The Road Through the Wall (1948). Upon graduation from Syracuse University in 1940 she married fellow student (and future literary critic) Stanley Edgar Hyman and eventually settled in New York City. In 1945 Hyman joined the faculty of Bennington College, and the couple moved with their growing family to North Bennington, Vermont. Jackson artfully chronicled the joys and difficulties of bringing up four garrulous, rambunctious children in Life Among the Savages (1953) and Raising Demons (1957), two works that place her among the front ranks of contemporary American humorists.
“I find [writing] relaxing,” Jackson once remarked. “There is delight in seeing a story grow; it’s so deeply satisfying—like having a winning streak in poker.” Her first nationally published short story, “My Life with R. H. Macy,” appeared in The New Republic in 1941. Jackson’s most famous story, “The Lottery,” was printed in The New Yorker on June 26, 1948. It prompted an unprecedented reaction from readers, most of whom felt betrayed by the story’s unexpected, gruesome ending. “I have been assured over and over that if it had been the only story I ever wrote or published, there would be people who would not forget my name,” confessed Jackson. “Of the three-hundred-odd letters that I received that summer I can count only thirteen that spoke kindly to me, and they were mostly from friends. Even my mother scolded me.” Her first collection of short fiction, The Lottery; or, The Adventures of James Harris, came out in 1949. In the children’s book The Witchcraft of Salem Village (1956) she attempted to explain in simplified terms the seeming madness that swept seventeenth-century Salem.
Jackson enhanced her reputation as a literary master with a succession of Gothic novels. Hangsaman (1951) tells of a shy, sensitive adolescent who escapes parental oppression by retreating into a nightmare fantasy world. The Bird’s Nest (1954), a psychological thriller about a woman with multiple personalities, was made into the 1957 film Lizzie. In The Sundial (1958) Jackson offered up a satirical, apocalyptic novel about a group of people who await Armageddon in a secluded country estate. The Haunting of Hill House (1959), a bloodcurdling ghost story hailed by Stephen King as one of the greatest horror novels of all time, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) is the macabre tale of two sisters ostracized by a community for allegedly murdering the rest of their family. “Jackson was a master of complexity of mood, an ironic explorer of the dark conflicting inner tyrannies of the mind and soul,” observed New York Times book critic Eliot Fremont-Smith.
Shirley Jackson died unexpectedly of heart failure on August 8, 1965. Stanley Edgar Hyman subsequently edited two omnibus collections of her work, The Magic of Shirley Jackson (1966) and Come Along with Me (1968). Just an Ordinary Day, a volume of Jackson’s unpublished and uncollected short fiction, appeared in 1997. “Everything this author wrote … has in it the dignity and plausibility of myth,” said The New York Times Book Review. “Shirley Jackson knew better than any writer since Hawthorne the value of haunted things.”