Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

There’s a pretty famous story about Shirley Jackson writing her legacy-making story “the Lottery.” The story goes that she thought up the idea one day at the supermarket, plotted it out on the drive home, typed it up, mailed it out, and a few short weeks later it appeared in The New Yorker.

This is a story Jackson herself told often. “There’s only one problem with Jackson’s origin myth,” Ruth Franklin tells us. “It is not entirely true.”

“The Lottery” underwent rewrites and had to be resubmitted before The New Yorker published the story in April 1948. And so Franklin dives into the myth and reality of the “haunted life” of one of the masters of 20th-century horror.

Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life does a great job boosting Jackson’s profile and stature, not just as a horror author but as a major player in 20th-century fiction in general.