After her death, Hyman explained his wife's eclectic work: 'Shirley Jackson wrote in a variety of forms and styles because she was, like everyone else, a complex human being, confronting the world in many different roles and moods. The diversity of her popular stories in such periodicals as The New Yorker, Good Housekeeping, The Hudson Review, Woman's Day, and The Yale Review thwarted the efforts of most critics to neatly categorize her work. A plain, overweight woman, Jackson continually embarrassed her socially conscious mother, and further disgraced her Protestant family by marrying Stanley Edgar Hyman, a left-wing Jew and fellow student from Syracuse University who later became an eminent literary critic.įollowing their marriage, the couple moved to the quaint village of North Bennington, Vermont, where Hyman taught English at the town's prestigious college and Jackson began publishing stories in various magazines. This work affirmed Jackson's loathing of intolerance and bigotry.

In her first novel, The Road through the Wall, she wrote of a snobbish neighborhood in suburban San Francisco and sketched its moral collapse as a result of prejudice and murder. Beginning in early childhood, Jackson claimed to possess psychic abilities and to be acutely aware of the clandestine thoughts and thinly-concealed viciousness of her upper-class community.

She saw that the line between the cruel and the comedic is sometimes vanishingly narrow.' Biographical Informationīorn into an affluent family in San Francisco, California, Jackson rebelled against her parents' superficial lifestyles and the restrictions that were placed upon women of her social class, and she chose to spend much of her time alone writing in journals. She saw the magic in the mundane, and the evil behind the ordinary. Mary Kittredge asserted: ' was the result of an exquisitely sensitive double vision that would have seemed an affliction to a less determined or talented writer. Jackson wrote in a deft, unadorned prose style that contrasts with the veracity of her nihilistic vision similarly, the charming hamlets which serve as her settings ironically underscore the true malevolence of their inhabitants. In works that often contain elements of conventional gothic horror, Jackson chronicles the universal evil underlying human nature. This frequently anthologized tale of victimization exemplifies the central themes of Jackson's fiction, which include such ordinary yet grotesque realities as prejudice, psychological malaise, loneliness, and cruelty.

Shirley Jackson wrote several best-selling novels, but she is usually identified with 'The Lottery,' a classic short story that established her literary reputation as an author of gothic horror fiction.

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson