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TODAY IN LITERARY HISTORY: 

Horror writer Shirley Jackson was born. [1916]

This American author has influenced a raft of later writers, especially in the horror genre, including Stephen King, Richard Matheson, and Neil Gaiman. Her short story ‘The Lottery’ has been widely acclaimed, and her 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House is viewed as one of the best ghost stories published in the twentieth century.

 


On June 26, 1948, subscribers to The New Yorker received a new issue of the magazine in the mail. There was nothing to outwardly indicate that it would be any different, or any more special, than any other issue. But inside was a story that editors at the magazine would, more than half a century later, call “perhaps the most controversial short story The New Yorker has ever published”: Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.”

Though now a classic, the story—about a small New England village whose residents follow an annual rite in which they draw slips of paper until, finally, one of them is selected to be stoned to death—caused an immediate outcry when it was published, and gave Jackson literary notoriety. “It was not my first published story, nor my last,” the writer recounted in a 1960 lecture, “but I have been assured over and over that if it had been the only story I ever wrote and published, there would still be people who would not forget my name.”

A troubled life lead to drug and alcohol abuse and she died of a heart attack at age 48.  A biography of her life has been authored by Ruth Franklin and is named in the top five non-fiction books of the year for those so-inclined to learn more.

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