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Shirley Jackson Biography

Shirley Jackson was born in San Francisco in 1916. Her mother was a housewife and her father was an employee of a lithographing company. Most of her early life was spentin Burlingame, California, which she later used as the setting for her first novel, The Road Through the Wall (1948). As a child, she was obsessed with writing, keeping journals to chart herprogress. She attended the University of Rochester in upstate New York, but, after suffering from mental depression that was to recur periodically throughout her life, she left school to concentrate solely onwriting. She lived quietly at home, writing prolific amounts of material; she conscientiously churned out a thousand works of prose a day. In 1937, she entered Syracuse University, where shepublished stories in the student literary magazine. It was there that she met her future husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman. After she received her BA degree, Jackson turned to writing full-time, while her husbandbecame a highly respected literary critic. They had four children and settled their family in a large Victorian house in Vermont, where Hyman taught literature at Bennington College. Jackson and Hymanhosted many of the leading literary figures of the 20th century at their home, including Ralph Ellison, J.D. Salinger, Bernard Malamud and Dylan Thomas. She passed away in 1965.
Jackson wasmethodical and disciplined as she wrote daily for long periods between regular naps. Her first national publication was a humorous story written after a job at a department store during the Christmas rush."My Life with R. H. Macy" appeared in The New Republic in 1941. She wrote regularly for The Reader's Digest, Colliers, and during the 1950's, published at least 44 short stories, six articles, twobook-length family chronicles, one children's nonfiction book, and four novels, all the while raising four children. Despite the demands of rearing her family, she maintained a strict writing schedule,...