Shirley Jackson biography
Shirley Jackson was born on December 14, 1916 in San Francisco. She spent her childhood in Burlingame, California where she got her start writing poetry and short stories as a teenager. She attended the University of Rochester in 1935 and, after a year, withdrew to focus on her writing. She spent the subsequent year practicing her writing and wrote a minimum of a thousand words per day. She then entered Syracuse University in 1937.
Jackson met her future husband at Syracuse University after winning a poetry contest. His name was Stanley Edgar Hyman and was an aspiring literary critic. After graduating in 1940 they moved to Greenwich Village in New York, where the first of their four children was born. In 1945 the family moved to North Bennington, Vermont after Hyman was offered a teaching job at Bennington College. There, Jackson spent her days raising children and taking care of her household, all while continuing to write daily. In 1949 the family was moved to Westport, Connecticut for Hyman's new job at The New Yorker. A few years later in 1951 they made one final move back to North Bennington where they would remain. On August 8, 1965 Jackson died of an unexpected heart failure in her sleep at the age of 48.
Jackson's first novel, The Road Through the Wall, was published in 1948. Soon after, The New Yorker published the short story, "The Lottery," which garnered the largest amount of mail the magazine has ever received. Unfortunately, the majority
of it was negative. In 1949 The Lottery, or The Adventures of James Harris, her second book, was published. This was a collection of her short stories. In 1951 Jackson began her foray into Gothic novels beginning with Hangsaman. This same year "The Summer People" was chosen to be included in Best American Short Stories. Jackson continued to gain prominence as a writer. "The Lottery" saw several television adaptations and was then taken to the stage. Life among the savages was published in 1953. Over the next several years she would publish many other novels and even a play. Then, in 1959, The Haunting of Hill House was published. This is her most well-known novel and is widely viewed as “the quintessential haunted house tale” ("Shirley Jackson"). The Haunting of Hill House has been adapted for film twice. Shirley Jackson was a prolific writer even up until her death. In 1961 “Louisa, Please” earned her the Edgar Allan Poe Award and in 1965 she was awarded the Arents Pioneer Medal for Outstanding Achievement from Syracuse University.
Jackson's writing specialized in the macabre and eerie. Because she wrote so much about witches and the paranormal, it is said that she used a broomstick for a pen. She loved to write, so much so that she did not see it as a job. She once said, "I can't persuade myself that writing is honest work. It's great fun and I love it" (The New York Times). When she died, she left behind an abundance of unpublished works. In 1996 Jackson's son, Laurence Hyman, and daughter, Sarah Hyman, published a collection of 54 new stories and had enough left over to publish a second. Jackson's legacy lives on in her works decades after her death.
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