Shirley Jackson

One of the foremost authors of twentieth-century supernatural fiction, Shirley Jackson published her first short story, Janice, whilst at Syracuse University in the late 1930s. Her rigorous regime of daily writing paid off, with numerous stories accepted by The New Yorker and The New Republic, whilst her first novel, The Road Through the Wall, was published in 1948. The same year saw the emergence of a short story by Jackson called The Lottery, a disturbing dystopian vision that outraged many readers when it was published in The New Yorker. The Lottery’s reputation has grown exponentially in the intervening years and it is now frequently regarded as the greatest short story of the twentieth century. Jackson continued to write prolifically throughout the 1950s, producing dozens of short stories and the gothic novels Hangsaman, The Bird’s Nest and The Sundial. In 1959 Jackson wrote the quintessential haunted house novel, The Haunting of Hill House, and three years later came the novella We Have Always Lived in the Castle, regarded by many as her masterpiece. The final years of her life were marked by increasing ill-health and addiction issues, although she was working on a new book, Come Along With Me, at the time of her death in 1965.