Shirley Jackson
Based on Wikipedia: Shirley Jackson
The Woman Who Made America Hate Itself
In the summer of 1948, The New Yorker published a short story that made readers furious. Over three hundred letters poured into the magazine's offices—confused, outraged, demanding explanations. Some readers cancelled their subscriptions. Others wrote to ask where they could go to watch the lottery being held.
The story was called "The Lottery." Its author was Shirley Jackson.
What had she done to provoke such a reaction? She had written a tale about a pleasant American village, the kind with lawns and gardens and children playing in the streets, where once a year the townspeople gather to stone one of their neighbors to death. The victim is chosen by lottery. Everyone participates. Then they go home.
Jackson explained her intentions with characteristic precision: "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."
She succeeded beyond anything she could have imagined.
A Difficult Beginning
Shirley Hardie Jackson was born on December 14, 1916, in San Francisco. Her family had money—the kind of money that comes from building mansions for railroad barons. Her great-great-grandfather, Samuel Charles Bugbee, was an architect whose clients included Leland Stanford and Charles Crocker, two of the four men who built the transcontinental railroad and accumulated fortunes that still echo through American philanthropy today.
Jackson had a sardonic view of this inheritance. "One of them built houses only for millionaires in California and that's where the family wealth came from," she once said, "and one of them was certain that houses could be made to stand on the sand dunes of San Francisco, and that's where the family wealth went."
Her childhood in Burlingame, an affluent suburb south of San Francisco, was not happy. Her mother, Geraldine, had married young and resented becoming pregnant almost immediately. She had wanted to spend time with her dashing new husband. Instead, she got Shirley.
The relationship between mother and daughter never recovered from this disappointment.
Geraldine made no secret of preferring her son Barry. Shirley's brother later explained their mother's hostility with uncomfortable clarity: she was "just a deeply conventional woman who was horrified by the idea that her daughter was not going to be deeply conventional."
And Shirley was not going to be deeply conventional. She spent her childhood writing while other children played. Her weight fluctuated as a teenager, leaving her with a lack of confidence that would haunt her for the rest of her life. She didn't fit in. She didn't want to fit in. She wanted to write.
Finding Her Voice
After high school, Jackson's parents enrolled her at the University of Rochester, where they felt they could keep an eye on her. She was miserable there. She took a year off, then transferred to Syracuse University, where everything changed.
At Syracuse, Jackson flourished. She became involved with the campus literary magazine and met a young man named Stanley Edgar Hyman, who would later become an influential literary critic. The magazine published her first story, "Janice," about a teenager's suicide attempt. She had found her subject matter: the darkness beneath ordinary surfaces.
She and Hyman married in 1940, shortly after graduating. They moved around for a few years—New York City, Westport, Connecticut—before settling in North Bennington, Vermont, where Hyman had been hired to teach at Bennington College. They would remain there for the rest of Jackson's life.
The Literary Household
The Jackson-Hyman household in North Bennington became famous in literary circles. They were generous, colorful hosts who filled their home with writers and intellectuals. Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man, was among their regular guests. They were voracious readers—their personal library was estimated at twenty-five thousand books.
They had four children: Laurence, Joanne, Sarah, and Barry. These children would achieve their own peculiar fame as fictionalized versions of themselves in their mother's stories and memoirs.
This is where the picture gets complicated.
Jackson became the family's primary breadwinner at a time when women were not supposed to work outside the home. She wrote constantly, produced prolifically, and also did all the shopping and cooking. Meals were always on time. Her son Laurence remembered her as buoyant, always laughing and telling jokes. One of her cartoons depicts a husband warning his pregnant wife not to carry heavy things—while not offering to help.
But according to Jackson's biographers, her marriage was troubled. Hyman had affairs, notably with his students. Jackson reluctantly agreed to his proposal of an open relationship. He controlled their finances, doling out portions of her own earnings to her as he saw fit, even though after "The Lottery" made her famous, she earned far more than he did.
This arrangement—the brilliant wife supporting the household while the husband controlled the money and pursued other women—seems impossibly cruel by contemporary standards. It was not unusual for its time.
The Lottery and Its Aftermath
Jackson's first novel, The Road Through the Wall, appeared in 1948. It was a semi-autobiographical account of her childhood in Burlingame, and it attracted modest attention. Then "The Lottery" appeared in The New Yorker on June 26 of that year, and everything changed.
The story was immediately recognized as a masterpiece. Critics loved it. Readers were horrified by it. It became a standard in anthologies almost overnight and was adapted for television in 1952.
Jackson was characteristically dry about the response. Describing the bewildered reactions of New Yorker readers, she noted that "the number of people who expected Mrs. Hutchinson to win a Bendix washing machine at the end would amaze you."
Mrs. Hutchinson, of course, wins something quite different from a washing machine.
The Gothic Years
Throughout the 1950s, Jackson published steadily: novels, short stories, and two memoirs about raising her children titled Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons. These domestic pieces were "true-to-life funny-housewife stories," precursors to the work of Jean Kerr and Erma Bombeck. They presented a charming, chaotic household full of mischievous children and comic mishaps.
But Jackson's serious fiction went somewhere much darker.
Her second novel, Hangsaman, drew on a real event: the mysterious disappearance of Paula Jean Welden, an eighteen-year-old Bennington College sophomore who vanished on December 1, 1946. She was last seen walking toward Glastenbury Mountain. Her body was never found. The case remains unsolved.
Jackson and her family were living in the area when it happened. The fictional college in Hangsaman is based partly on Bennington. The missing girl would appear again in Jackson's short story "The Missing Girl," published in 1957.
Her fourth novel, The Bird's Nest, explored multiple personality disorder—what we now call dissociative identity disorder. One of her publishers called it "a perfect novel." The marketing department, less enthusiastic about literary perfection, pushed it as a psychological horror story, which annoyed Jackson considerably.
The Sundial followed in 1958, concerning a family of wealthy eccentrics who believe they have been chosen to survive the end of the world.
The Haunting
Then, in 1959, Jackson published the book that would cement her reputation: The Haunting of Hill House.
The novel follows a group of individuals participating in a paranormal study at a reportedly haunted mansion. It is, on its surface, a ghost story. But Jackson was interested in something more unsettling than simple supernatural terror. She was interested in psychology—in the way the house seems to respond to, and perhaps exploit, the vulnerabilities of its inhabitants.
The novel has been called not only the best haunted-house story ever written but a quiet subversion of the ingénue trope in horror fiction. Stephen King has named it one of the most important horror novels of the twentieth century. It has been adapted for film twice, in 1963 and 1999, and inspired the Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House in 2018.
Its opening paragraph is famous:
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.
That final phrase—"whatever walked there, walked alone"—contains the essence of Jackson's particular genius. She understood that the truly frightening thing about haunted houses is not the ghost but the loneliness.
Religion, Witchcraft, and the Family Ghost
Jackson's interest in the supernatural had roots in her childhood. Her maternal grandmother, nicknamed "Mimi," was a Christian Science practitioner—a form of religious healing developed in the late nineteenth century by Mary Baker Eddy, which teaches that illness can be cured through prayer and spiritual understanding rather than medicine.
Jackson was skeptical. She recalled a time when Mimi claimed to have broken her leg and healed it through prayer overnight, though she had really only lightly sprained her ankle. When Mimi died, Jackson told her daughter that she "died of Christian Science."
But while Jackson rejected organized religion as easily becoming "a vehicle for harm," the religious influences of her childhood saturated her writing. Mysticism, mental power, witchcraft—these themes run through her work like underground rivers.
The Castle
By the early 1960s, Jackson's health was failing. She was a heavy smoker and suffered from chronic asthma. She experienced joint pain, exhaustion, and dizziness leading to fainting spells, attributed to a heart problem. Severe anxiety kept her housebound for extended periods—a condition worsened by colitis, which made even short trips from home physically difficult.
Her doctors prescribed barbiturates for the anxiety and amphetamines for weight loss. We now know that amphetamines can worsen anxiety, creating a vicious cycle: the stimulants made her anxious, so she took sedatives, which made her tired, so she took more stimulants. At the time, both drugs were considered safe and harmless.
She also drank heavily.
Jackson confided to friends that she felt patronized in her role as a "faculty wife" and ostracized by the townspeople of North Bennington. The same community she had described so memorably in "The Lottery"—the pleasant village with its dark secret—was, in her experience, not particularly pleasant to her.
Despite all of this, she continued to write. In 1962, she published her final novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
It is a Gothic mystery told from the perspective of Merricat Blackwood, a young woman living in isolation with her sister Constance after most of their family was poisoned. The townspeople hate them. The sisters survive in their decaying mansion, performing small domestic rituals that may or may not be magic.
Time magazine named it one of the ten best novels of 1962. Many critics consider it Jackson's masterpiece—a distillation of everything she had learned about fear, isolation, and the way communities turn on those who don't belong.
The End
In her final years, Jackson began to improve. She responded well to therapy and started to resume normal activities, including speaking engagements at writers' conferences. She was planning a new novel called Come Along with Me, which she described as a major departure from her previous work.
She never finished it.
On August 8, 1965, Shirley Jackson died in her sleep at her home in North Bennington. She was forty-eight years old. The cause was a coronary occlusion—a blockage of the arteries supplying blood to the heart—due to arteriosclerosis.
She was cremated, as she had wished.
What She Left Behind
In 1968, Jackson's husband published a posthumous collection of her work titled Come Along with Me. It contained the unfinished novel, fourteen previously uncollected short stories, and three lectures she had given at colleges and writers' conferences near the end of her life.
Nearly thirty years later, in 1996, a crate of unpublished stories was discovered in a barn behind Jackson's house. Some of these were published in a collection called Just an Ordinary Day.
Jackson's reputation has only grown since her death. She is now recognized as one of the most influential American writers of the twentieth century, a master of psychological horror who understood that the most terrifying monsters are the ones we live with—our neighbors, our families, ourselves.
"The persona that Jackson presented to the world was powerful, witty, even imposing," wrote Zoë Heller in The New Yorker. "She could be sharp and aggressive with fey Bennington girls and salesclerks and people who interrupted her writing."
She had to be. She was a woman writing horror in an era that expected women to write about domesticity—so she wrote about domesticity as horror. She was raising four children and supporting a household while her husband controlled her money and slept with his students. She was ostracized by her community and undermined by her own mother. She was taking pills that made her sick and drinking to cope with the pills.
And through all of this, she wrote six novels, two memoirs, and more than two hundred short stories. She created "The Lottery," which remains, more than seventy-five years after its publication, one of the most discussed and taught short stories in American literature. She wrote The Haunting of Hill House, which defined the modern ghost story. She wrote We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which generations of readers have recognized as a portrait of their own alienation.
Whatever walked there, walked alone. But Shirley Jackson made sure we knew we were walking beside her.