Shirley Jackson

Who Was Shirley Jackson?

Shirley Jackson was the most significant American writer of literary horror in the twentieth century — a novelist and short story writer whose work used the conventions of the uncanny and the supernatural to explore the real terrors of domestic life, social conformity, and the violence that communities direct against their own members. Born in San Francisco, educated at Syracuse University, she spent most of her adult life in Vermont with her husband, the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, raising four children and writing with a productivity and a darkness that her domestic circumstances both fed and concealed.

Her short story “The Lottery” (1948), published in The New Yorker, generated more letters of protest than any fiction the magazine had ever published — letters that were, by and large, angry rather than horrified, which tells us something important about the story’s effect. It describes a small American town conducting its annual ritual of selecting a victim by lot and stoning her to death. The horror is not the violence; it is the normalcy that surrounds it.

Her novels — The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) — are masterpieces of psychological horror that use the haunted house and the isolated family as images of the human mind under pressure. Jackson is significant for TLA because her work takes seriously the reality of evil — not as a metaphysical abstraction but as a force that operates through the most ordinary social arrangements.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• The Lottery — 1948 — short story
• The Haunting of Hill House — 1959 — novel
• We Have Always Lived in the Castle — 1962 — novel
• The Road Through the Wall — 1948 — novel
• Life Among the Savages — 1953 — memoir