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Shirley Jackson

This article is about the American writer. For the physicist and former president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, see Shirley Ann Jackson.

Shirley Jackson
Jackson in 1940[1]
Jackson in 1940[1]
BornShirley Hardie Jackson
(1916-12-14)December 14, 1916
San Francisco, California, U.S.
DiedAugust 8, 1965(1965-08-08) (aged 48)
North Bennington, Vermont, U.S.
OccupationWriter
EducationUniversity of Rochester
Syracuse University (BA)
Genre
Years active1943–1965
Notable works"The Lottery"
Life Among the Savages
The Haunting of Hill House
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Spouse
​
(m. 1940)​
Children4
Signature
External images
Photographs
image icon Jackson, 1934[2]
image icon Jackson, by June Mirken Mintz[3]
image icon Jackson with first child, circa 1944[4]
image icon Jackson, 16 April 1951[5]
image icon Jackson , late 1950s[6]
image icon Jackson, Hyman family[7]
image icon Jackson[7] by Erich Hartmann

Shirley Hardie Jackson (December 14, 1916 – August 8, 1965) was an American writer known primarily for her works of horror and mystery. Her writing career spanned over two decades, during which she composed six novels, two memoirs, and more than 200 short stories.

Born in San Francisco, California, Jackson attended Syracuse University in New York, where she became involved with the university's literary magazine and met her future husband Stanley Edgar Hyman.[8] After they graduated, the couple moved to New York City and began contributing to The New Yorker, with Jackson as a fiction writer and Hyman as a contributor to "Talk of the Town". The couple settled in North Bennington, Vermont, in 1945, after the birth of their first child, when Hyman joined the faculty of Bennington College.[9]

After publishing her debut novel, The Road Through the Wall (1948), a semi-autobiographical account of her childhood in California, Jackson gained significant public attention for her short story "The Lottery", which presents the sinister underside of a bucolic American village. She continued to publish numerous short stories in literary journals and magazines throughout the 1950s, some of which were assembled and reissued in her 1953 memoir Life Among the Savages. In 1959, she published The Haunting of Hill House, a supernatural horror novel widely considered to be one of the best ghost stories ever written.[a] Jackson's final work, the 1962 novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle, is a Gothic mystery that has been described as Jackson's masterpiece.[10]

By the 1960s, Jackson's health began to deteriorate significantly, ultimately leading to her death due to a heart condition in 1965 at the age of 48.

  1. ^ Miller, Laura (July 11, 2021). "The Alternating Identities of Shirley Jackson". The New York Times. Retrieved August 3, 2022.
  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference rochester-1938 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ Devers, A. N. (December 14, 2016). "The Great American Housewife Writer: A Shirley Jackson Primer". Longreads. Retrieved August 3, 2022.
  4. ^ McGrath, Charles (September 30, 2016). "The Case for Shirley Jackson". The New York Times. Retrieved August 3, 2022.
  5. ^ "This Is What 1950s and '60s Critics Said About Shirley Jackson's Work". Time. December 14, 2016. Retrieved August 3, 2022.
  6. ^ Miller, Laura (October 5, 2016). "The Eerie and Cheery Life of Shirley Jackson". Slate. Retrieved August 3, 2022.
  7. ^ a b "The Novelist Disguised As a Housewife". The Cut. September 27, 2016. Retrieved August 3, 2022.
  8. ^ Heller, Zoë (October 10, 2016) [October 10, 2016]. "The Haunted Mind of Shirley Jackson". The New Yorker. ISSN 0028-792X. Archived from the original on February 24, 2023. Retrieved August 2, 2024.
  9. ^ Zoë, Heller (October 17, 2016). "The Haunted Mind of Shirley Jackson". The New Yorker.
  10. ^ Heller, Zoë (October 17, 2016). "The Haunted Mind of Shirley Jackson". The New Yorker. Retrieved May 25, 2020.


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