Shirley Jackson
Shirley Hardie Jackson (December 14, 1916 – August 8, 1965) was an American writer known primarily for her works of horror and mystery. Over the duration of her writing career, which spanned over two decades, she composed six novels, two memoirs, and more than 200 short stories.
This article is about the American writer. For the physicist and former president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, see Shirley Ann Jackson.
Shirley Jackson
Shirley Hardie Jackson
December 14, 1916
San Francisco, California, U.S.
August 8, 1965 (aged 48)
North Bennington, Vermont, U.S.
Writer
1943–1965
4
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. After they graduated, the couple moved to New York 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.[8]
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 which has been described as Jackson's masterpiece.[9]
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.
Early life[edit]
Jackson was born December 14, 1916,[10][11] in San Francisco, California, to Leslie Jackson and his wife Geraldine (née Bugby).[12][b]
Jackson was raised in Burlingame, California, an affluent suburb of San Francisco, where her family resided in a two-story home located at 1609 Forest View Road.[14] Her relationship with her mother was strained, as her parents had married young and Geraldine had been disappointed when she immediately became pregnant with Shirley, as she had been looking forward to "spending time with her dashing husband".[15] Jackson was often unable to fit in with other children and spent much of her time writing, much to her mother's distress. Geraldine made no attempt to hide her favoritism towards her son, Barry, who explained his mother's antagonism towards Shirley by saying, "[Geraldine] was just a deeply conventional woman who was horrified by the idea that her daughter was not going to be deeply conventional."[16] When Shirley was a teenager, her weight fluctuated, resulting in a lack of confidence that she would struggle with throughout her life.[17][18]
She attended Burlingame High School, where she played violin in the school orchestra.[19] During her senior year of high school, the Jackson family relocated to Rochester, New York,[19] after which she attended Brighton High School, receiving her diploma in 1934.[20] She then attended the nearby University of Rochester, where her parents felt they could maintain supervision over her studies.[21] Jackson was unhappy in her classes there,[22][2] and took a year-long hiatus from her studies before transferring to Syracuse University, where she flourished both creatively and socially.[23] Here she received her bachelor's degree in journalism.[24] While a student at Syracuse, Jackson became involved with the campus literary magazine, through which she met her future husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, who later became a noted literary critic.[25] While attending Syracuse, the university's literary magazine published Jackson's first story, "Janice", about a teenager's suicide attempt.[26]
Marriage[edit]
After graduating, Jackson and Hyman married in 1940, and had brief sojourns in New York City and Westport, Connecticut, ultimately settling in North Bennington, Vermont,[35] where Hyman had been hired as an instructor at Bennington College.[36] Jackson began writing material as Hyman established himself as a critic. Jackson and Hyman were known for being colorful, generous hosts who surrounded themselves with literary talents, including Ralph Ellison.[37] They were both enthusiastic readers whose personal library was estimated at 25,000 books.[38] They had four children, Laurence (Laurie), Joanne (Jannie), Sarah (Sally), and Barry, who later achieved their own brand of literary fame as fictionalized versions of themselves in their mother's short stories. In an era when women were not encouraged to work outside the home, Jackson became the chief breadwinner while also raising the couple's children.[8] "She did work hard," her son Laurence said. "She was always writing, or thinking about writing, and she did all the shopping and cooking, too. The meals were always on time. But she also loved to laugh and tell jokes. She was very buoyant that way." For examples of her wit, he refers readers to her many humorous cartoons, one of which depicts a husband cautioning a wife not to carry heavy things during pregnancy, but not offering to help.[39][40]
According to Jackson's biographers, her marriage was plagued by Hyman's infidelities, notably with his students, and she reluctantly agreed to his proposition of maintaining an open relationship.[41] Hyman also controlled their finances (meting out portions of her earnings to her as he saw fit), despite the fact that after the success of "The Lottery" and later work she earned far more than he did.[42]
Writing career[edit]
"The Lottery" and early publications[edit]
In 1948, Jackson published her debut novel, The Road Through the Wall, which tells a semi-autobiographical account of her childhood growing up in Burlingame, California, in the 1920s. Jackson's most famous story, "The Lottery", first published in The New Yorker on June 26, 1948, established her reputation as a master of the horror tale.[43] The story prompted over 300 letters from readers,[44] many of them outraged at its conjuring of a dark aspect of human nature,[43] characterized by, as Jackson put it, "bewilderment, speculation, and old-fashioned abuse".[45] In the July 22, 1948, issue of the San Francisco Chronicle, Jackson offered the following in response to persistent queries from her readers about her intentions: "Explaining just what I had hoped the story to say is very difficult. I suppose I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village, to shock the story's readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives."[46]
The critical reaction to the story was unequivocally positive; the story quickly became a standard in anthologies and was adapted for television in 1952.[47] In 1949, "The Lottery" was published in a short story collection of Jackson's titled The Lottery and Other Stories.[48]
Jackson's second novel, Hangsaman (1951), contained elements similar to the mysterious real-life December 1, 1946, disappearance of an 18-year-old Bennington College sophomore Paula Jean Welden. This event, which remains unsolved to this day, took place in the wooded wilderness of Glastenbury Mountain near Bennington in southern Vermont, where Jackson and her family were living at the time. The fictional college depicted in Hangsaman is based in part on Jackson's experiences at Bennington College, as indicated by Jackson's papers in the Library of Congress.[49][50] The event also served as inspiration for her short story "The Missing Girl" (first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1957, and posthumously in Just an Ordinary Day [1996]).
The following year, she published Life Among the Savages, a semi-autobiographical collection of short stories based on her own life with her four children,[51] many of which had been published prior in popular magazines such as Good Housekeeping, Woman's Day and Collier's.[47] Semi-fictionalized versions of her marriage and the experience of bringing up four children, these works are "true-to-life funny-housewife stories" of the type later popularized by such writers as Jean Kerr and Erma Bombeck during the 1950s and 1960s.[52]
Reluctant to discuss her work with the public, Jackson wrote in Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft's Twentieth Century Authors (1955):[53]
Audio files