Shirley jackson biography of a story

Shirley Jackson, “Biography of a Story”

Shirley Jackson (–)
From Shirley Jackson: Novels & Stories

Yesterday, December 14, marked the th anniversary of the birth of Shirley Jackson.

“In my imagination,” Jackson wrote, “I dwelt lovingly upon the thought of the millions and millions of people who were going to be uplifted and enriched and delighted by the stories I wrote.” What she didn’t imagine, however, was receiving hundreds of angry and baffled letters (some of which might accurately be called “hate mail”) in response to a story she published in June in a magazine—especially a magazine such as The New Yorker. “This gloomy kind of story is what all you young people think about these days,” read one of the first of the several hundred letters she received in response to “The Lottery.” Why don’t you write something to cheer people up?” And that letter was from her own mother.

Jack

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Shirley Jackson (&#;)
From Shirley Jackson: Novels & Stories

Olive Dunbar as Tess Hutchinson in the dramatization of &#;The Lottery,&#; directed by Larry Yust as part of Encyclopaedia Britannica's &#;Short Story Showcase&#; series. A minute discussion of the story by University of Southern California professor James Durbin was added to the performance. According to the Academic Film Archive, it became one of the best-selling films ever produced for educators.

It is probably the most famous work of fiction ever published in The New Yorkerand certainly the magazine&#;s most controversial, generating letters of protest and bafflement and even a number of subscription cancellations. And it remains one of the most anthologized and influential stories ever written in English, required reading for several generations of high school students and the precursor to hundreds of horror stories and works of dystopian fiction. Since its publication in June , readers, critics

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A new biography argues that Jackson’s books should be seen as ration by Cristiana Couceiro; Source: Frances Benjamin Johnston / Library of Congress (House)

Here’s how not to be taken seriously as a woman writer: Use demons and ghosts and other gothic paraphernalia in your fiction. Describe yourself publicly as “a practicing amateur witch” and boast about the hexes you have placed on prominent publishers. Contribute comic essays to women’s magazines about your hectic life as a housewife and mother.

Shirley Jackson did all of these things, and, during her lifetime, was largely dismissed as a talented purveyor of high-toned horror stories—“Virginia Werewoolf,” as one critic put it. For most of the fifty-one years since her death, that reputation has stuck. Today, “The Lottery,” her story of ritual human sacrifice in a New England village (first published in this magazine, in ), has become a staple of eighth-grade reading lists, and her novel “The Haunting of Hill House” () is oft