Jackson, Shirley (1916-1965), was an American novelist and short-story writer known for her tales of psychological horror. Her most popular novel is probably The Haunting of Hill House (1959). This story of the supernatural describes the tragic effects of hatred. Her other novels include The Road Through the Wall (1948), Hangsaman (1951), The Bird’s Nest (1954), The Sundial (1958), and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962).
Jackson’s best-known short story, “The Lottery” (1948), tells of gruesome human sacrifice in a seemingly ordinary small American town. Some of her other short stories deal with such social issues as prejudice and the loneliness of modern American women. Several of these works are more realistic than her novels. Jackson also wrote humorously about her four children in two fictionalized autobiographies, Life Among the Savages (1953) and Raising Demons (1957).
A collection of Jackson’s fiction and lectures called Come Along with Me was published in 1968, after her death. Many of her stories were collected in Just an Ordinary Day (1996). In 2010, the Library of America published Shirley Jackson: Novels and Stories, edited by the American writer Joyce Carol Oates. The book includes two novels and 46 stories, many previously uncollected and unpublished. A collection of Jackson’s unpublished and uncollected fiction and nonfiction was published in 2015 as Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings . A collection of her letters spanning the years 1938 to 1965 was published in 2021 as The Letters of Shirley Jackson.
Shirley Hardie Jackson was born on Dec. 14, 1916, in San Francisco. She was married to the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman. Jackson died on Aug. 8, 1965.
