In such unforgettable works as The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson took the American gothic tradition of Poe, Hawthorne, and Lovecraft and brought it down to earth, revealing that broad daylight held more subtle but no less chilling horrors. She was a master, as Dorothy Parker put it, of “beautifully written, quiet, cumulative shudders,” exploring the uncanny recesses concealed within the prosperous, conformist world of the postwar 1940s and 50s—and within our own unacknowledged selves. Here, for the first time in a single volume, Jackson’s award-winning biographer Ruth Franklin gathers the four hypnotic novels with which she began her irreplaceable, all-too-brief career. Jackson’s haunting debut, The Road Through the Wall (1948), explores the secret longings, petty hatreds, and ultimate terrors that lurk behind the manicured lawns and picture-perfect domestic facades of a California suburb. In Hangsaman (1951)––inspired in part by Jackson’s own troubled years at the University of Rochester––precocious Natalie Waite, newly arrived on campus, grows increasingly dependent on a friend who may or may not be imaginary. The Bird’s Nest (1954) pits four unforgettable characters against each other in a battle for control: the shy, migraine-prone young office worker Elizabeth versus Elizabeth’s other multiple personalities. In The Sundial (1958), the eccentric Halloran clan, gathered at the family manse for a funeral, becomes convinced that the world is about to end and that only those who remain within the house will be saved. In what is perhaps her most unsettling novel, Jackson relates their crazed, violent preparations for the afterlife.
Author
Shirley Jackson was an influential American author. A popular writer in her time, her work has received increasing attention from literary critics in recent years. She has influenced such writers as Stephen King, Nigel Kneale, and Richard Matheson. She is best known for her dystopian short story, "The Lottery" (1948), which suggests there is a deeply unsettling underside to bucolic, smalltown America. In her critical biography of Shirley Jackson, Lenemaja Friedman notes that when Shirley Jackson's story "The Lottery" was published in the June 28, 1948, issue of The New Yorker, it received a response that "no New Yorker story had ever received." Hundreds of letters poured in that were characterized by, as Jackson put it, "bewilderment, speculation and old-fashioned abuse." Jackson's husband, the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, wrote in his preface to a posthumous anthology of her work that "she consistently refused to be interviewed, to explain or promote her work in any fashion, or to take public stands and be the pundit of the Sunday supplements. She believed that her books would speak for her clearly enough over the years." Hyman insisted the darker aspects of Jackson's works were not, as some critics claimed, the product of "personal, even neurotic, fantasies", but that Jackson intended, as "a sensitive and faithful anatomy of our times, fitting symbols for our distressing world of the concentration camp and the Bomb", to mirror humanity's Cold War-era fears. Jackson may even have taken pleasure in the subversive impact of her work, as revealed by Hyman's statement that she "was always proud that the Union of South Africa banned The Lottery', and she felt that they at least understood the story". In 1965, Jackson died of heart failure in her sleep, at her home in North Bennington Vermont, at the age of 48.
