Shirley jackson biography criticism

As recently as six years ago, when the Library of America released a collection of Shirley Jackson’s writings, her legacy was uncertain. “Shirley Jackson?” Newsweek critic Malcolm Jones wrote.

“A writer mostly famous for one short story, ‘The Lottery.’ Is LOA about to jump the shark?” True, no one who’s read “The Lottery” is ever going to forget it.

Shirley jackson biography criticism and analysis

The story created such a sensation when it appeared in the New Yorker in 1948 that the magazine issued a press release saying it had received more mail in response to it than to any work of fiction it had ever published.

But Jackson also wrote many other indelible short stories, as well as two great short novels, one of which, The Haunting of Hill House, was nominated for a National Book Award in 1960.

Hill House lost to Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, a fact that pretty much encapsulates Jackson’s professional plight.

She wrote spare, idiosyncratic, unsettling fiction, tinged with a hectic misanthropy, abou