Biography of a Story

Shirley Jackson (1916–1965)
From Shirley Jackson: Novels & Stories

Interesting Links

Video (in two parts): Larry Yust’s dramatic adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” (20 minutes) followed by James Durbin’s discussion of the story (10 minutes)

Audio: A. M. Homes reads “The Lottery” and discusses it with The New Yorker’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman.

“Haunted Womanhood”: A review of Ruth Franklin’s biography of Shirley Jackson (Heather Havrilesky, The Atlantic)

Previous Story of the Week selections by Shirley Jackson
• “Charles”
• “The Night We All Had Grippe”

Buy the book
Shirley Jackson: Novels & Stories
The Lottery • The Haunting of Hill House • We Have Always Lived in the Castle • other stories and sketches • 827 pages
List price: $35.00
Web Store price: $25.00

Olive Dunbar as Tess Hutchinson in the 1969 dramatization of “The Lottery,” directed by Larry Yust as part of Encyclopaedia Britannica's “Short Story Showcase” series. A 10-minute discussion of the story by University of Southern California professor James Durbin was added to the performance. According to the Academic Film Archive, it became one of the best-selling films ever produced for educators.

It is probably the most famous work of fiction ever published in The New Yorker and certainly the magazine’s most controversial, generating letters of protest and bafflement and even a number of subscription cancellations. And it remains one of the most anthologized and influential stories ever written in English, required reading for several generations of high school students and the precursor to hundreds of horror stories and works of dystopian fiction. Since its publication in June 1948, readers, critics, and scholars have quarreled over the story’s “meaning.” Yet perhaps nobody was more surprised by the reaction to “The Lottery” than the author herself.

If Shirley Jackson is to be believed—and she most assuredly isn’t—“The Lottery” came to her quite easily three weeks before it was published, and the editors made only one minor change. That’s what she told audiences whenever she spoke about the story’s publication. The truth, as William Brennan points out, is a bit more complicated. Jackson sent a draft to The New Yorker several months before the story’s publication, and there were a number of changes suggested by editors over the following weeks. “Jackson, like most writers,” concludes Brennan, “achieved greatness with patient work and the help of others—her editors, her agent, and her literary-critic husband. Drafts were written and rewritten; phone calls with editors were made; galleys were drawn up and edited; and, in the end, the story appeared in print months after it had been conceived.”

The editors of The New Yorker received more mail about “The Lottery” than they had ever received in response to a short story. Alfred L. Kroeber, an anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, was among those who protested the story’s premise. “If Shirley Jackson’s intent was to symbolize into complete mystification, and at the same time be gratuitously disagreeable, she certainly succeeded.” His daughter, Ursula K. Le Guin, was nineteen at the time, and she recently told Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin, “My memory is that my father was indignant at Shirley Jackson’s story because as a social anthropologist he felt that she didn’t, and couldn’t, tell us how the lottery could come to be an accepted social institution.”

Jackson included the comment from Kroeber, without identifying him by name, in an amusing speech recounting the days following the story’s publication and quoting many of the readers’ reactions. Jackson often gave some version of this prepared talk at colleges and writers’ conferences during the last decade of her life, and it was edited by her husband and published posthumously in 1968. In honor of the centennial of Jackson’s birth on December 14, 1916, we present that speech, “Biography of a Story,” as our Story of the Week selection.

Note: One of the readers quoted by Jackson mentions In Fact, a monthly newsletter that billed itself “An Antidote for Falsehood in the Daily Press” and that published media criticism and investigated stories not covered in newspapers.

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On the morning of June 26, 1948, I walked down to the post office in our little Vermont town to pick up the mail. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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The Night We All Had Grippe

Shirley Jackson (1916–1965)
From Shirley Jackson: Novels & Stories

Interesting Links
“I’m Sorry, Ms. Jackson: On Shirley Jackson and the challenge of being both a mother and a writer” (Ruth Franklin, The New Republic)

“The Great Grippe Mystery” [contains spoilers] (Gregory Cowles, The New York Times)

Other Story of the Week selections
• “Charles,” Shirley Jackson
• “The Night the Bed Fell,” James Thurber
• “A Stick of Green Candy,” Jane Bowles

Buy the book
Shirley Jackson: Novels & Stories
The Lottery • The Haunting of Hill House • We Have Always Lived in the Castle • more • 827 pages
List price: $35.00
Web store price: $25.00

Detail from “The Great Grippe Mystery,” illustration by Herbert Danska (b. 1926) for “The Night We All Had Grippe,” Harper’s, January 1952. Click here to see entire illustration.

Of the five hundred selections presented by Story of the Week over the last decade, the most widely read is “Charles,” by Shirley Jackson—a perennial favorite among schoolchildren (and, we must assume, their teachers). The story presented many readers, young and old, with a side of Jackson quite different from the writer famous for such horror classics as “The Lottery,” We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and The Haunting of Hill House. First published in Mademoiselle, “Charles” was reprinted in her 1949 collection The Lottery, and then revised and incorporated into her humorous family memoir Life Among the Savages.

“The Night We All Had Grippe” is another of Jackson’s comic tales chronicling her adventures as the mother of three children, and it recounts the night her entire family was confined at home with the flu (what used to be called “the grippe”). When Gregory Cowles, a staff editor for The New York Times Book Review, discovered the story a few years back, he admitted to surprise

“Shirley Jackson?” I said. “The author of ‘The Lottery’?”

The very one. . . . For those of us accustomed to her position as Important Anthologized Story Writer, it’s a bizarre transformation, like learning that Chekhov had a second career writing jokes for Johnny Carson.

Intrigued, Cowles took the bait and found Jackson’s domestic tales “genuinely charming.” Indeed, when Jackson first delivered the manuscript to her publisher in late 1952, her editor, Margaret Farrar, extolled the book to her colleagues: “Completely delightful and entertaining reading—not Shirley on a broomstick at all.” The staff of the publishing house Farrar, Straus knew they had a best seller on their hands.

The breadth of Jackson’s writing is beginning to be appreciated by academics as well. In an essay on Jackson’s “comic-satiric-fantastic-Gothic” modes, James Egan (a Renaissance literature scholar and, at the time, an associate editor of Seventeenth-Century News) noted how her fiction extends “from domestically comic scenarios like those of Jean Kerr and Erma Bombeck; to mainstream, conventional satires of manners such as Sinclair Lewis might have written; to the metaphysically fantastic idioms of Nathanael West and Franz Kakfa.”

It’s long-overdue respectability for a woman who arrived woozily at the hospital to deliver her third child, only to face the following exchange.

“Name?” the desk clerk said to me politely, her pencil poised.
“Name,” I said vaguely. I remembered, and told her.
“Age?” she asked. “Sex? Occupation?”
“Writer,” I said.
“Housewife,” she said.
“Writer,” I said.
“I’ll just put down housewife,” she said.
        [from “The Third Baby’s the Easiest”]

“Jackson sets down these lines without bitterness,” noted critic Ruth Franklin a decade ago in an essay reappraising her oeuvre. “But they made me think of how many women writers—particularly American women writers in the postwar era, the era without servants—have both profited and suffered from the confusion of their dual role. . . . Then and still now, women write when the baby naps, while the children are at school, after the dishes are done and the lunches are packed and the house is at last quiet.”

Franklin went on to write a best-selling biography of Jackson, in which she argued that the “two aspects of Jackson’s writing are profoundly interconnected. Her horror stories, which always take place primarily on a psychological level, are grounded in the domestic [while] the domestic tales often need only the gentlest tap to slide into the dark, as with ‘Charles.’” It is that “gentlest tap,” an almost cynical edginess, that caused one contemporary reviewer to call her the “female Thurber,” and readers will surely notice how “The Night We All Grippe” contains faint echoes of one of James Thurber’s most famous stories.

The above introduction, first posted in May 2011, was revised and updated in April 2020.

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We are all of us, in our family, very fond of puzzles. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection is used by permission.
To photocopy and distribute this selection for classroom use, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center.

Charles

Shirley Jackson (1916–1965)
From Shirley Jackson: Novels and Stories

Interesting Links

Interview with Joyce Carol Oates about Shirley Jackson (PDF, Library of America)

“Monstrous Acts and Little Murders,” a review of the writings of Shirley Jackson (Jonathan Lethem, Salon)

Buy the bookShirley Jackson:
Novels and Stories
The Lottery | The Haunting of Hill House | We Have Always Lived in the Castle | other stories and sketches | 827 pages
List price: $35.00
Web store price: $28.00

In a 1997 appreciation, Jonathan Lethem observes that Shirley Jackson’s “forté was psychology and society, people in other words—people disturbed, dispossessed, misunderstanding or thwarting one another compulsively, people colluding absently in monstrous acts.” Likewise, Joyce Carol Oates in a recent interview describes her as a “literary Gothicist”; Jackson did not write “about the supernatural as an end in itself—only its psychological manifestations.” There is a conspicuous lack of ghosts and ghouls in Jackson’s fiction; instead there are haunted minds.

Although today she is better known for tales of psychological horror (especially The Haunting of Hill House and, of course, “The Lottery”), Jackson also wrote humorous, unsentimental tales of ordinary domestic life. “Charles” is the first of her numerous semi-autobiographical stories of life as a 1940s housewife raising children who sometimes seemed one step outside her ability to control them. Jackson originally published the story in Mademoiselle and included it in the collection The Lottery; or, The Adventures of James Harris, and she later incorporated this episode, stripped of its fictional veneer, in her memoir Life Among the Savages. Alternating between menace and whimsy in its description of Laurie’s impish classmate, the story draws its piquancy less from the outcome than from its humor and its sly winks at the credulity of parents.

Bonus story: Thanks to the generosity of the Jackson estate and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, we are able to make available a second story from the just-published Library of America Shirley Jackson collection to Story of the Week readers. Click here (PDF) to download “Trial by Combat,” about the unsettling showdown between a young woman and the not-quite-menacing widow who is her neighbor.

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The day my son Laurie started kindergarten he renounced corduroy overalls with bibs and began wearing blue jeans with a belt; I watched him go off the first morning with the older girl next door, seeing clearly that an era of my life was ended, my sweet-voiced nursery-school tot replaced by a long-trousered, swaggering character who forgot to stop at the corner and wave good-bye to me. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection is used by permission.
To photocopy and distribute this selection for classroom use, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center.