Shirley Jackson 1916 – 1965

Biography

Shirley Jackson was born in San Francisco, California, and grew up in Burlingame before studying at Syracuse University, where she met her future husband, the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman. Her first novel, The Road Through the Wall, was followed by Hangsaman and The Bird’s Nest, but she became famous with The Haunting of Hill House, one of the great haunted-house novels, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, her chilling final novel of two sisters living in isolation. Her short story The Lottery, published in The New Yorker in 1948, shocked readers with its portrait of ritual violence in a small town and became one of the most famous stories in American literature. She died in North Bennington, Vermont, in 1965, at the age of forty-eight. Her work experienced a major revival in the twenty-first century, with new editions and a celebrated film of We Have Always Lived in the Castle.