The life of Shilrey Jackson

  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 their four children was born. In 1944 Jackson’s story “Come Dance With Me in Ireland” was chosen for Best American Short Stories.


  Some biographers claimed that her husband slept with students at the all-women's college he taught at in Vermont – indeed, after Jackson's death in 1965, he married one of them.




  Her first novel, The Road Through The Wall, was published in 1948. That same year The New Yorker published Jackson’s iconic story, “The Lottery,” which generated the largest volume of mail ever received by the magazine---before or since---almost all of it hateful.

  In 1951 Jackson’s succession of Gothic novels began with the publication of Hangsaman, and her “The Summer People” was chosen for Best American Short Stories. In 1952, “The Lottery” had its first of several adaptations for television.



  Jackson died at the age of 48 on August 8th, 1965, she was addicted to drugs and alcohol, and died of a heart-attack. Shortly after she died, an entire box of unpublished works was found in an old barn near her home.