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Shirley Jackson

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This article is about the author. For the physicist and university president, see Shirley Jackson (physicist).


Image:Sjacksonlottery.jpg Shirley Jackson (December 14, 1916 <ref>Murphy, Bernice (2004-08-31). Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) (HTML). The Literary Encyclopedia. Retrieved on 2006-05-09.</ref>– August 8, 1965) was an American author. Although a popular writer in her time, her work has been largely ignored by literary critics until relatively recently. Her most famous works are her short story "The Lottery" (1948), which suggests there is a deeply unsettling underside to bucolic, smalltown America, and the novel The Haunting of Hill House (1959), an update of the classic ghost story to a contemporary setting. In addition to "The Lottery," her major works are generally considered to be the novels The Sundial (1958) and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962). Her work has influenced such writers as Stephen King, Nigel Kneale and Richard Matheson.

Born in San Francisco , she graduated with a BA from Syracuse University in 1940. While a student there, she met future husband Stanley Edgar Hyman, who was to become a noted literary critic. For Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Harcraft's Twentieth Century Authors (1954), she wrote:

I very much dislike writing about myself or my work, and when pressed for autobiographical material can only give a bare chronological outline which contains, naturally, no pertinent facts. I was born in San Francisco in 1919 and spent most of my early life in California. I was married in 1940 to Stanley Edgar Hyman, critic and numismatist, and we live in Vermont, in a quiet rural community with fine scenery and comfortably far away from city life. Our major exports are books and children, both of which we produce in abundance. The children are Laurence, Joanne, Sarah and Barry: my books include three novels, The Road Through The Wall, Hangsaman, The Bird's Nest and a collection of short stories, The Lottery. Life Among the Savages is a disrespectful memoir of my children.

Although Jackson claimed to have been born in 1919 in order to appear younger than her husband, biographer Judy Oppenheimer determined that she was actually born in 1916. In addition to her adult literary novels, Jackson also wrote a children's novel, Nine Magic Wishes, available in an edition illustrated by her grandson, Miles Hyman. In a series of short stories, later collected in the books Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons, she presented a fictionalized version of her marriage and the experience of bringing up four children. These stories pioneered the "true-to-life funny-housewife stories" of the type later popularized by such writers as Jean Kerr and Erma Bombeck during the 1950s and 1960s.

After Jackson's death, her husband released a posthumous volume of her work, Come Along With Me, containing several chapters of her unfinished last novel as well as several rare short stories (among them "Louisa, Please Come Home") and three speeches given by Jackson in her writing seminars.

Contents

[edit] Magazines

In 1938, while she was studying at Syracuse, her first published story, "Janice," appeared, and the stories that followed were published in Collier's, Good Housekeeping, Harper's, Mademoiselle, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Woman's Day, Woman's Home Companion and other magazines.

In 1996, a crate of unpublished stories was found in the barn behind Jackson's house. The best of those stories, along with previously uncollected stories from various magazines, were published in the 1996 collection, Just an Ordinary Day. The title was taken from one of her stories for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, "One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts." A large number of Ms. Jackson's papers are available in the Library of Congress.

[edit] Literary studies

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Judy Oppenheimer combined literary analysis, amusing anecdotes and scholarly research for a major biographical exploration of Shirley Jackson's life and career in Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson (Putnam, 1988). S. T. Joshi's The Modern Weird Tale (2001) offers a critical essay on Jackson's work. Darryl Hattenhauer provided the first comprehensive survey of all of Jackson's fiction in Shirley Jackson's American Gothic (State University of New York Press, 2003).

[edit] Listen to

[edit] Awards

  • 1959 National Book Award nomination: We Have Always Lived in the Castle
  • 1966 Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best Short Story: "The Possibility of Evil" (Saturday Evening Post, December 18, 1965)
  • 1961 Edgar Allen Poe Award: Louisia, Please

[edit] Novels

[edit] Short fiction (partial list)

  • "The Possibility of Evil"
  • "The Lottery"
  • "The Intoxicated"
  • "The Daemon Lover"
  • "Like Mother Used to Make"
  • "Trial by Combat"
  • "The Villager"
  • "My Life with R. H. Macy"
  • "The Witch"
  • "The Renegade"
  • "After You, My Dear Alphonse"
  • "Charles"
  • "Afternoon in Linen"
  • "Flower Garden"
  • "Dorothy and My Grandmother and the Sailors"
  • "Colloquy"
  • "Elizabeth"
  • "A Fine Old Firm"
  • "The Dummy"
  • "Seven Types of Ambiguity"
  • "Come Dance with Me in Ireland"
  • "Of Course"
  • "Pillar of Salt"
  • "Men with Their Big Shoes"
  • "The Tooth"
  • "One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts"
  • "Got a Letter from Jimmy"
  • "Epilogue"
  • "Louisa, Please Come Home"

[edit] References

  • Murphy, Bernice. Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy
  • Oppenheimer, Judy. Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson. New York: Putnam, 1988.
  • Shapiro, Laura. Something From the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America

[edit] External links

Wikisource has original works written by or about:

sv:Shirley Jackson

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