Dear Hill House readers,
Our read-along of The Haunting of Hill House begins next week. All the details are here.
In the meantime, here is a brief biography of Shirley Jackson.
Jackson was born in 1916 in San Francisco and studied literature in New York, where she met her husband, the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman. They married in 1940 and both began contributing to the New Yorker, moving to rural Vermont when Hyman joined the faculty at Bennington College.
In 1948, Jackson’s award-winning short story ‘The Lottery’ in The New Yorker brought her acclaim and notoriety. It established her as an author of disquieting, sinister and often shocking fiction. Dorothy Parker called her the ‘leader in the field of beautifully written, quiet, cumulative shudders’.
Jackson published six dark novels, the most famous of which are The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), as well as two collections of humorous, domestic vignettes about life with Stanley and their four children: Life Among the Savages (1953) and Raising Demons (1957).
In the late 1950s, Jackson began to develop severe anxiety, which sometimes kept her housebound. She gained weight, smoked heavily and was prescribed an addictive combination of barbiturates and amphetamines, which led to her death in 1965 at the age of 48.
In 2007, the Shirley Jackson Awards were inaugurated in her memory, awarded annually for outstanding achievements in the literature of ‘psychological suspense, horror and dark fantasy’. At this year’s ceremony in July, the jury presented a Special Award to Elizabeth Hand for her novel A Haunting on the Hill, an authorized sequel to The Haunting of Hill House.
What else should we say about Jackson before we read Hill House? Please do share any comments below.
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One of the formative books for Steven King.
I’m playing catch up with the book but this reminds me that, if I can bear to, I must re-read The Lottery. It’s one of those short stories that left me stunned first time around, and now I know the outcome I’m wondering what the effect will be.