Shirley Jackson

Shirley Hardie Jackson was an American author born on December 14, 1916, in San Francisco, California, and raised in the affluent suburb of Burlingame. Her relationship with her mother, Geraldine, was difficult; Geraldine had been disappointed by her pregnancy and openly favored Jackson’s younger brother. Jackson struggled to fit in with peers and turned to writing, a pursuit her mother disapproved of. After her family moved to Rochester, New York, she graduated from Brighton High School in 1934.

She briefly attended the University of Rochester but was unhappy, taking a year off before transferring to Syracuse University. There she thrived, earning a degree in journalism and becoming involved with the campus literary magazine, which published her first story, “Janice,” about a teenager’s suicide attempt. At Syracuse, she met her future husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, a noted literary critic. They married in 1940 and, after short stays in New York City and Westport, Connecticut, settled in North Bennington, Vermont, in 1945 after the birth of their first child, when Hyman joined the faculty of Bennington College.

The couple had four children—Laurence, Joanne, Sarah, and Barry—who later appeared as fictionalized versions of themselves in Jackson’s short stories. Jackson became the family’s primary breadwinner while raising the children, writing constantly. Her debut novel, The Road Through the Wall (1948), was a semi-autobiographical account of her California childhood.

She gained widespread attention for her short story “The Lottery,” which reveals the dark undercurrents of a seemingly peaceful village. Throughout the 1950s, she published numerous short stories, some collected in her 1953 memoir Life Among the Savages. Her 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House is considered a landmark supernatural horror story, and her final novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), is regarded as a Gothic psychological masterpiece. Jackson’s health declined in the 1960s, and she died of a heart condition on August 8, 1965, at age 48.