Shirley Jackson

At 48 years old, Shirley Jackson physical status not available right now. We will update Shirley Jackson's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

In 1948, Jackson published her debut novel, The Road Through the Wall, which tells a semi-autobiographical account of her childhood growing up in Burlingame, California, in the 1920s. Jackson's most famous story, "The Lottery", first published in The New Yorker on June 26, 1948, established her reputation as a master of the horror tale. The story prompted over 300 letters from readers, many of them outraged at its conjuring of a dark aspect of human nature, characterized by, as Jackson put it, "bewilderment, speculation, and old-fashioned abuse". In the July 22, 1948, issue of the San Francisco Chronicle, Jackson offered the following in response to persistent queries from her readers about her intentions: "Explaining just what I had hoped the story to say is very difficult. 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."

The critical reaction to the story was unequivocally positive; the story quickly became a standard in anthologies and was adapted for television in 1952. In 1949, "The Lottery" was published in a short story collection of Jackson's titled The Lottery and Other Stories.

Jackson's second novel, Hangsaman (1951), contained elements similar to the mysterious real-life December 1, 1946, disappearance of an 18-year-old Bennington College sophomore Paula Jean Welden. This event, which remains unsolved to this day, took place in the wooded wilderness of Glastenbury Mountain near Bennington in southern Vermont, where Jackson and her family were living at the time. The fictional college depicted in Hangsaman is based in part on Jackson's experiences at Bennington College, as indicated by Jackson's papers in the Library of Congress. The event also served as inspiration for her short story "The Missing Girl" (first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1957, and posthumously in Just an Ordinary Day [1996]).

The following year, she published Life Among the Savages, a semi-autobiographical collection of short stories based on her own life with her four children, many of which had been published prior in popular magazines such as Good Housekeeping, Woman's Day and Collier's. Semi-fictionalized versions of her marriage and the experience of bringing up four children, these works are "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.

Reluctant to discuss her work with the public, Jackson wrote in Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft's Twentieth Century Authors (1955):

"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. Her letters are filled with tartly funny observations. Describing the bewildered response of The New Yorker readers to 'The Lottery,' she notes, 'The number of people who expected Mrs. Hutchinson to win a Bendix washing machine at the end would amaze you.'"

In 1954, Jackson published The Bird's Nest (1954), which detailed a woman with multiple personalities and her relationship with her psychiatrist. One of Jackson's publishers, Roger Straus, deemed The Bird's Nest "a perfect novel", but the publishing house marketed it as a psychological horror story, which displeased her. Her following novel, The Sundial, was published four years later and concerned a family of wealthy eccentrics who believe they have been chosen to survive the end of the world. She later published two memoirs, Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons.

Jackson's fifth novel, The Haunting of Hill House (1959), follows a group of individuals participating in a paranormal study at a reportedly haunted mansion. The novel, which interpolated supernatural phenomena with psychology, went on to become a critically esteemed example of the haunted house story, and was described by Stephen King as one of the most important horror novels of the twentieth century. Also in 1959, Jackson published the one-act children's musical The Bad Children, based on Hansel and Gretel.

By the time The Haunting of Hill House had been published, Jackson suffered numerous health problems. She was a heavy smoker, which resulted in chronic asthma, joint pain, exhaustion, and dizziness leading to fainting spells, which were attributed to a heart problem. Near the end of her life, Jackson also saw a psychiatrist for severe anxiety, which had kept her housebound for extended periods of time, a problem worsened by a diagnosis of colitis, which made it physically difficult to travel even short distances from her home. To ease her anxiety and agoraphobia, the doctor prescribed barbiturates, which at that time were considered a safe, harmless drug. For many years, she also had periodic prescriptions for amphetamines for weight loss, which may have inadvertently aggravated her anxiety, leading to a cycle of prescription drug abuse using the two medications to counteract each other's effects. Any of these factors, or a combination of all of them, may have contributed to her declining health. Jackson confided to friends that she felt patronized in her role as a "faculty wife", and ostracized by the townspeople of North Bennington. Her dislike of this situation led to her increasing abuse of alcohol in addition to tranquilizers and amphetamines.

Despite her failing health, Jackson continued to write and publish several works in the 1960s, including her final novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), a Gothic mystery novel. It was named by Time magazine as one of the "Ten Best Novels" of 1962. The following year, she published Nine Magic Wishes, an illustrated children's novel about a child who encounters a magician who grants him numerous enchanting wishes. The psychological aspects of her illness responded well to therapy, and by 1964 she began to resume normal activities, including a round of speaking engagements at writers' conferences, as well as planning a new novel titled Come Along with Me, which was to be a major departure from the style and subject matter of her previous works.

In 1965, Jackson died in her sleep at her home in North Bennington, at the age of 48. Her death was attributed to a coronary occlusion due to arteriosclerosis or cardiac arrest. She was cremated, as was her wish.

In 1968, Jackson's husband released a posthumous volume of her work, Come Along with Me, containing her unfinished last novel, as well as 14 previously uncollected short stories (among them "Louisa, Please Come Home") and three lectures she gave at colleges or writers' conferences in her last years.

In 1996, a crate of unpublished stories was found in a barn behind Jackson's house. A selection of those stories, along with previously uncollected stories from various magazines, were published in the 1996 volume Just an Ordinary Day. The title was taken from one of her stories for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, "One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts".

Jackson's papers are available in the Library of Congress. In its August 5, 2013, issue The New Yorker published "Paranoia", which the magazine said was discovered at the library. Let Me Tell You, a collection of stories and essays by Jackson (mostly unpublished) was released in 2015.

In December 2020, the short story "Adventure on a Bad Night" was published for the first time, appearing in The Strand Magazine.

Source

• 1944 – Best American Short Stories 1944: "Come Dance with Me in Ireland"
• 1949 – O. Henry Prize Stories 1949: "The Lottery"
• 1951 – Best American Short Stories 1951: "The Summer People"
• 1956 – Best American Short Stories 1956: "One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts"
• 1959 – New York Times Book Review's "Best Fiction of 1959" includes The Haunting of Hill House.
• 1960 – National Book Award nomination: The Haunting of Hill House
• 1961 – Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe Award nomination for Best Short Story: "Louisa, Please Come Home"
• 1962 – Time magazine's "Ten Best Novels" of the year includes We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
• 1964 – Best American Short Stories 1964: "Birthday Party"
• 1966 – Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Short Story: "The Possibility of Evil"
• 1966 – New York Times Book Review's "Best Fiction of 1966" includes The Magic of Shirley Jackson.
• 1968 – New York Times Book Review's "Best Fiction of 1968" includes Come Along with Me.
• 2006 - Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe Award nomination for Best Short Story: "Family Treasures"
• 2007 – The Shirley Jackson Award is established for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic.