“The Lottery” (1948) is Shirley Jackson‘s best-known short story; it could be argued it’s her most famous classic — even more widely read than The Haunting of Hill House or We Have Always Lived in the Castle. 

Once published, the story quickly catapulted her to fame— or, more accurately, notoriety. Its most potent theme — scapegoating —is all too relevant in today’s world, and so, the story continues to resonate.

Jackson, just in her early thirties, wrote it only three weeks before its publication in The New Yorker (full text as it appeared in 1948),“on a bright summer morning as I was pushing my daughter up the hill in her stroller.” And the story begins, rather benignly: Read More→

Shirley Jackson’s haunting classic short story “The Lottery” made her famous in 1948, and subsequent books cemented her brand of psychological terror. So when she came out with Life Among the Savages in 1953, reviewers  were delighted and surprised by her cheery and wry observations of life with four children and husband in a shabby, rambling house in Vermont.

It turns out that Life Among the Savages, and its follow-up, Raising Demons, were idealized (and somewhat-to-fairly fictionalized) portrayals of the family’s chaotic life and individual eccentricities. Read More→

Shirley Jackson (1916 – 1965) occasionally turned to true crime news stories as jumping off points for her novels of psychological terror and suspense. This was apparently the case for her second novel, Hangsaman (1951).

Jackson, her husband Stanley Edgar Hyman, and their four children were living in North Bennington when 18-year-old Bennington College freshman Paula Jean Weldon disappeared. She went out for a hike on December 1, 1946, and simply never returned.

There were, and have since been, theories about what might have happened to Weldon, but neither she —nor her body — were ever found. Read More→