Shirley Jackson papers

Shirley Jackson was a 20th century author. Born on December 14, 1919 to a mother from a long line of San Francisco architects (a strong influence on her writing) and a father from England, Shirley spent the first fourteen years of her life in the San Francisco area. She began writing verse almost as soon as she could write, according to her mother. At the age of twelve she won a poetry contest sponsored by the Junior Home Magazine for her poem "The Pine Tree." She spent two years at the University of Rochester, but was unhappy and withdrew in June of 1936. In the fall of 1937 she entered Syracuse University. Her first story, "Janice," was published in the college magazine in 1938, the same year she was appointed fiction editor of the campus humor magazine.

Jackson graduated from Syracuse in 1940 and immediately married Stanley Edgar Hyman. The following year The New Republic ran her first national publication, "My Life With R.H. Macy." Her first novel, "The Road Through the Wall," was published in 1948, along with her most well-known story, "The Lottery." Her novel "We Have Always Lived in the Castle" was on the best-seller list in 1962, and Time magazine named it one of the year's ten best.

As well as maintaining a strict writing schedule, Jackson was the mother of four children, Laurence, born in 1942, Joanne, in 1945, Sarah, in 1948, and Barry, in 1951. She published two family chronicles, "Life Among the Savages" and "Raising Demons." Shirley Jackson died of heart failure on August 8, 1965, at the age of forty-five.