Shirley Jackson

 

Shirley Jackson was an influential American author. A popular writer in her time, her work has received increasing attention from literary critics in recent years. She has influenced such writers as Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Nigel Kneale and Richard Matheson.She is best known for "The Lottery" (1948), which suggests a deeply unsettling underside to bucolic small-town America. In her critical biography of Jackson, Lenemaja Friedman notes that when "The Lottery" was published in the June 26, 1948 issue of The New Yorker, it received a response that "no New Yorker story had ever received." Hundreds of letters poured in that were characterized by, as Jackson put it, "bewilderment, speculation and old-fashioned abuse." 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. Jackson's husband, the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, wrote in his preface to a posthumous anthology of her short stories that "she wanted always to be interviewed, to explain or promote her work in any fashion, or to take public stands and be the pundit of the Sunday supplements. She believed that her books would not speak for her clearly enough over the years." Hyman insisted the darker aspects of Jackson's works were not, as some critics claimed, the product of "personal, even neurotic, fantasies," but that Jackson intended, as "a sensitive and faithful anatomy of our times, fitting symbols for our distressing world of the concentration camp and the Bomb," to mirror humanity's Cold War-era fears. Jackson may even have taken pleasure in the subversive impact of her work, as evidenced by Hyman's statement that she "was always proud that the Union of South Africa banned "The Lottery", and she felt that they at least understood the story. For people of later generations she is probably best remembered for penning of The Haunting of Hill House which was turned into a movie. She was born Shirley Hardle Jackson to an affluent middle-class family in Burlingame, California. He first novel was The Road Through The Wall which featured the suburb where she grew up. The family moved to New York where she attending the University of Rochester. She graduated from Syracuse University and met and married her husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, who became a noted literary critic. They settled in North Bennington, Vermont and raised four children. She was always an enthusiastic reader and the Hymans were known for being colorful, generous hosts who surrounded themselves with literary talents. Unfortunately, Shirley was plagued by psychosomatic illnesses and various neuroses. These along wth heavy smoking, obesity and dependence on various rescription drugs probably contributed to her early death due to heart failure.