Although best known for “The Lottery”, there was much more to Shirley Jackson’s work—and life. At the New York Times, Charles McGrath reviews of Ruth Franklin’s new biography A Rather Haunted Life, and explores Franklin’s journalistic yet personal take on the woman who remains massively influential, but often overlooked in the American literary canon. In spite of (and likely, because of) personal struggle, addiction, and her eventual breakdown and early death at forty-eight, McGrath notes how Franklin sees Jackson “not as an oddball, one-off writer of horror tales and ghost stories but as someone belonging to the great tradition of Hawthorne, Poe and James, writers preoccupied, as she was, with inner evil in the human soul.”
Beyond “The Lottery”
Rosamund Lannin
Rosamund Lannin reads and writes in Chicago. When not hosting lady live lit show Miss Spoken and editing Story Club Magazine, she writes for Extra Crispy, HelloGiggles, and everywhere else pancakes and essays intersect. Daily dispatches @rosamundlannin.