Cora's Blog

  Shirley Jackson won the Edgar award for best short story. The Shirley Jackson Awards are literary awards named after Shirley Jackson in recognition of her legacy in writing. These awards for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror and the dark fantastic are presented at Readercon, an annual conference on imaginative literature.   Award-winners are selected by a jury of professional writers, editors, critics and academics, with input from a Board of Advisors. The awards are given for the best work published in the preceding calendar year in the following categories: Novel, Novella, Novelette, Short Story, Single-Author Collection and Edited Anthology. The first annual Shirley Jackson Awards were presented July 20, 2007 at the Readercon Conference on Imaginative Literature in Burlington, Massachusetts. 2015 winners Novel: "Experimental Film" Gemma Files (ChiZine Publications) Novella: "Wylding Hall" Elizabeth Hand (PS Publishing /...

Jackson attended the University of Rochester but didn’t graduate. She dropped out due to depression and grappled with mental health issues, including psychosomatic illnesses, her entire life. She also may have been addicted to pain killers. slowly declining her health is what may have been what led to her premature death of heart failure at such a young age. This may provide a glimpse into her mind, and it may have been what sowed the seeds of her often dark imagination. Many people believed you can see her depression and her mental illness in her writings. Each story was dark, and many people reading the stories didn't understand why Jackson would want to write such dark stories.

   Although it is often unclear which specific authors Jackson would draw her influence from, it was evident in her writings from an early age that her inspiration came from her view that there was a hidden dark side in everyone (“Shirley Jackson Biography”). In this way, it is better to say that her own life and her perspective influenced her more than anything.    "The Summer People", "The Lottery", " The Witch" "The Renegade", and " We Have Always Lived In The Castle" speak to the prejudice and cruelty of human beings. Jackson wanted to show everyday evil in her writings.    Her best-known novel, The Haunting of Hill House, is the quintessential haunted-house story. Published in 1959 and filmed in 1963 as The Haunting, it is a masterpiece of edgy tension and creeping terror, telling the story of a paranormal investigator and his carefully picked guests, who stay in the titular property in a bid to prove the existence of the supernat...

   June 26 1948 was when the story "The Lottery" was published. After it was published the story got an extreme about of hate. Many people cancelled their subscriptions to the magazine were it was published. People called the story "outrageous"  "gruesome" and "utterly pointless." So many people were outraged by this story. They didn't understand why Jackson would write such a story.     Shortly after the story was published, a friend sent Jackson a note, saying, “Heard a man talking about a story of yours on the bus this morning. Very exciting. I wanted to tell him I knew the author, but after I heard what he was saying, I decided I’d better not.”  Jackson later said that June 26, 1948 was “the last time for months I was to pick up the mail without an active feeling of panic.”  The New Yorker  forwarded the mail they received about her story—sometimes as many as 10 to 12 letters a day. Jackson was forced to switch to the biggest possible...

https://sites.middlebury.edu/individualandthesociety/files/2010/09/jackson_lottery.pdf

  Shirley Jackson was born in San Francisco on December 14, 1916, and spent her childhood in nearby Burlingame, California, where she began writing poetry and short stories as a young teenager. Her family moved East when she was seventeen, and she attended the University of Rochester. After a year, in 1936, she withdrew and spent a year at home practicing writing, producing a minimum of a thousand words a day.   She entered Syracuse University in 1937, where she published her first story, “Janice,” and was soon appointed fiction editor of the campus humor magazine. After winning a poetry contest at Syracuse she met her future husband, critic Stanley Edgar Hyman they had four children together, and they founded a literary magazine, Spectre, with Hyman as editor. They moved to New York’s Greenwich Village, where Shirley wrote without fail every day while working her job. She began having her stories published in The New Republic and The New Yorker, and the first of ...