The Letters of Shirley Jackson
Page 63
Just an Ordinary Day
Let Me Tell You
Dark Tales
9 Magic Wishes
Special Delivery
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shirley Hardie Jackson was born in San Francisco in 1916, and grew up in Burlingame, an affluent suburb of the city. In 1933 the family moved to Rochester, New York, and Shirley finished school there. She enrolled at Syracuse University and met Stanley Edgar Hyman, and they graduated in 1940, moving to an apartment in New York. Their first child was born in 1942. Shirley published numerous short stories in national magazines but finally received wide critical acclaim for “The Lottery,” which was published in The New Yorker in 1948. Between 1945 and 1951 their family grew from three to six, with four children spaced with almost mathematical precision within three years of one another. Shirley is the author of six novels, including The Haunting of Hill House, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and The Sundial; two bestselling family chronicles, Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons; hundreds of short stories, many published in five collections; several children’s books; and two plays. Her work has been adapted for film, television, stage, musicals, and ballets. She died in 1965, at the age of forty-eight, while working on a comic novel, Come Along with Me, published (unfinished) posthumously.
ABOUT THE EDITOR
Laurence Jackson Hyman, the eldest child of Shirley Jackson and Stanley Edgar Hyman, has spent most of his professional life in publishing—as a writer, photographer, editor, art director, and publisher. More than sixty of his black-and-white photographs are collected by the Bennington Museum in Vermont. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of dozens of books and monographs, including Going to Chicago (Woodford, 1989), Really the Blues (Woodford, 1996—winner of a prestigious W. C. Handy Award), and The Great Jazz Day (Woodford in 1993 and Da Capo Press in 2000), and Shirley Jackson’s Just an Ordinary Day (Bantam, 1997) and Let Me Tell You (Random House, 2015). He founded Woodford Publishing and Woodford Press in San Francisco and managed them for nearly three decades, and in 2018 he was an executive producer for the film adaptation of We Have Always Lived in the Castle. He has also worked as a professional jazz trumpet player for more than sixty-five years.
ABOUT THE ACADEMIC CONSULTANT
Bernice M. Murphy is an associate professor/lecturer in popular literature at the School of English, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. She edited the collection Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy and has written several articles and book chapters on Jackson’s writing. She is also an expert on American horror and gothic narratives. Her current work in progress is a monograph entitled The California Gothic in Fiction and Film.
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