JACKSON, Shirley

(1919-1965)

   US short-story writer and novelist, married from 1940 to the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman (1919-1970), with whom she wrote (but was solely credited for) Life Among the Savages (1953) and Raising Demons (1957), two light memoirs of family life whose effect was radicallydissimilar to that of her fiction, none of which is sf in any orthodox sense. Much of her work - like her first story, "Janice" (1937) - comprises psychological studies of women at the end of their tether. She became famous for one story, "The Lottery" (1948), which established her reputation as an author of GOTHIC fiction; the ritual stoning which climaxes the tale is perhaps more easily explicable in terms of HORROR than of sf, but the New England in which the event occurs betrays the profile of a land suffering the aftermath of the some vast CATASTROPHE. Most of the remaining stories assembled in The Lottery, or The Adventuresof James Hardis (coll 1949) are fantasies of alienation. Unnamed but tangible catastrophe is the explicit subject of The Sundial (1958), in which 12 of her New England characters await the END OF THE WORLD. The Haunting of Hill House (1959), filmed as The Haunting (1963) by RobertWISE, is a superb ghost story.

   JC

   Other works: Hangsaman (1951); We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962); Come Along with Me (coll 1968); The Lottery; The Haunting of Hill House; We Have Always Lived in the Castle (omni 1991).