Shirley Jackson

Shirley Jackson was raised in a ritzy suburb of San Francisco by Leslie and Geraldine Jackson. Jackson began writing at a young age and she published her first story—“Janice”—while attending Syracuse University in New York. In 1940, after graduating college, Jackson married Stanley Edgar Hyman, a literary critic, and moved to North Bennington, Vermont where she spent most of her life. From 1940 onward, Jackson wrote constantly, a process which culminated in her first novel—The Road Through the Wall—in 1948. 1948 proved to be an important year for Jackson as she also published “The Lottery,” her most famous story, in The New Yorker on June 26th. “The Lottery” proved to be quite controversial, but it made a literary star out of Jackson, and over the next two decades she produced a number of important works, including The Haunting of Hill House (1959), We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), and “The Possibility of Evil” (1965). Jackson’s stories and novels won her much acclaim, including an O. Henry Award for “The Lottery” and a National Book Award nomination for The Haunting of Hill House. Jackson’s contemporaries praised her as a master of gothic literature and an incisive critic of American values. Jackson died in 1965 of a heart issue at only 48 years old. At the time of her death, she was working on a new novel, which was eventually published in a collection of her previously unreleased works called Come Along with Me.