Shirley Jackson
1916-1965
Other Works
The Sundial
The Haunting of Hill House
Novelist at 16 When Shirley Jackson was just 16 years old, she grew weary of the book she was reading and decided to write her own. She hurriedly composed a murder mystery and then read it to her family. She was disappointed by their lukewarm reaction, however, and decided never to write again. Fortunately, Jackson changed her mind. By the time she was a student at Syracuse University in New York, she had already chosen writing as a career and had set a goal for herself of writing at least 1,000 words a day.
A Little Humor Jackson guarded her privacy and was hesitant to discuss her family in public. Still, some of her stories are undoubtedly autobiographical. These are not, however, her stories of cruelty, evil, prejudice, and mass hysteria. Jackson also wrote two collections of extremely funny stories called Life among the Savages and Raising Demons. They describe hilarious events that apparently occurred in her own family while she and her husband were raising their four children in North Bennington, Vermont.
A Sad Ending While writing one of her last novels, Jackson began to suffer from health problems, including asthma, arthritis, and anxiety. In spite of her illness, however, she wrote We Have Always Lived in the Castle, a best-seller that was eventually turned into a Broadway play. A few years later, while working on her last novel, Jackson died quite suddenly from heart
failure at the age of 48.
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