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Shirley Jackson: About

Shirley Jackson

Shirley Jackson lived at 18 Indian Hill Road from October 1949 to April 1952. Along with her husband, New Yorker staff writer Stanley Edgar Hyman, they hosted countless get-togethers with their famous friends, such as fellow writers Dylan Thomas, JD Salinger, and Ralph Ellison. Ellison wrote much of Invisible man there, Salinger finished Catcher in the Rye, and Jackson wrote her novel Hangsaman while in town.

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Who is Shirley Jackson?

Shirley Jackson, 1916-1965, one of the most brilliant and influential authors of the twentieth century, is widely acclaimed for her stories and novels of the supernatural, including the well-known short story “The Lottery” and the best-selling novel “The Haunting of Hill House.”

Shirley Jackson was born in San Francisco on December 14, 1916, and spent her childhood in nearby Burlingame, California, where she began writing poetry and short stories as a young teenager.   Her family moved East when she was seventeen, and she attended the University of Rochester.   After a year, in 1936, she withdrew and spent a year at home practicing writing, producing a minimum of a thousand words a day.  

She entered Syracuse University in 1937, where she published her first story, “Janice,” and was soon appointed fiction editor of the campus humor magazine.   After winning a poetry contest at Syracuse she met her future husband, young aspiring literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, and together they founded a literary magazine, Spectre, with Hyman as editor.   Both graduated in 1940 and moved to New York’s Greenwich Village, where Shirley wrote without fail every day while they both worked odd jobs.   She began having her stories published in The New Republic and The New Yorker, and the first of their four children was born.   In 1944 Jackson’s story “Come Dance With Me in Ireland” was chosen for Best American Short Stories.

In 1945, Stanley Hyman was offered a teaching position at Bennington College, and they moved into an old house in North Bennington, Vermont, where Shirley continued her daily writing while raising children and running a household.   Her first novel, The Road Through The Wall, was published in 1948.   That same year The New Yorker published Jackson’s iconic story, “The Lottery,” which generated the largest volume of mail ever received by the magazine---before or since---almost all of it hateful.   “The Lottery” has since been published in dozens of languages, and is still required reading in U.S. high schools.  It is possibly the most well-known short story of the 20th Century. Continue reading from Shirley Jackson Official

From the Collection

Link to Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin in the catalog
Link to The Letters of Shirley Jackson edited by Laurence Jackson Hyman in the catalog
Link to We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson in the catalog
Link to Let Me Tell You: new stories, essays, and other writings by Shirley Jackson, edited by Laurence Jackson Hyman and Sarah Hyman DeWitt in the catalog
Link to Shirley DVD directed by Josephine Decker in the catalog
Link to Come along with Me: classic short stories and an unfinished novel by Shirley Jackson, edited by Stanley Edgar Hyman in the catalog
Link to Shirley Jackson: Four Novels of the 1940s And 50s (LOA #336) edited by Ruth Franklin in the catalog
Link to When Things Get Dark: Stories Inspired by Shirley Jackson edited by Ellen Datlow in the catalog
Link to Life Among the Savages by Shirley Jackson in the catalog
Link to The Bird's Nest by Shirley Jackson in the catalog

Link to Revolutionary Biographies Resource Guide Series