Rober Diaz. Peninsula 360 Press [P360P].
Born on December 14, 1916 in San Francisco, California, like her literature, Shirley Hardie Jackson's childhood was full of aberrations and contradictions that would deeply mark the writer. Her mother, Geraldine even said that she had not had to be born. The reason she gave was because she needed to spend more time with her handsome husband. Facing her mother's personality, little Shirley had trouble socializing with her peers. She preferred, much to her mother's chagrin, to isolate herself in order to write. She asked herself questions like her character, the teenage Merricat of The Road Through the Wall (1948): "Who wants us out there? The world is full of bad people."
His adolescence, also broken by not fitting the standards of beauty prevailing at the time, suffered from overweight. His literary activity would grow as Jackson finished college, collaborating with literary magazines such as Harper's, The New Republic, The New Yorker, among others. Soon after, she married the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman with whom she would have, "four children, four cats, a dog and a hamster" as she would write.
His literature is peppered with a stench of strangeness and vileness; a prevailing mystery that he lived through, or rather suffered from, in the town of North Bennington, New England, where he would live a little hell thanks to the accusation he made, along with other parents, of a local teacher for physically abusing students. The inhabitants of the village were on top of him and he was often offended by this action, a situation which exacerbated his already isolated tendency and which he reflected well in his novel The Road Through the Wall where a couple of women are harassed by an entire village, forcing them to stay indoors or go out very little, in the face of a massacre that has taken place in their unclear home.
The voice that predominates in Shirley is struggling with its immediate spaces to which it fills them with mysteries and everyday situations that by their simplicity makes them spin with great narrative precision, let's say without getting dirty, but yes, transforming it, turning the common into something abnormal and even terrifying.
Shirley, suffered the United States after the 50's, those of the cold war, a village society, hostile and conservative where the role of women was relegated to domestic work. Jackson, relived with her husband the rejection that her mother Geraldine had shown her; Stanley called her: "that talented idiot" controlled her finances (even though she earned much more than he did) and forced her, moreover, to endure her infidelities.
He lived in a state of continuous excitement from which he fed his favorite subjects: anguish and claustrophobia. The protagonists of his works are dragged by the force of circumstances and their personal ghosts: the monstrous is found in family relationships, circles of friends, neighbours, houses and villages.
He died on August 8, 1965. In addition to being overweight, he suffered from alcoholism. His health was weakened by the constant use of barbiturates to control his growing anxiety. She spent her last days at home, prey to a terrible agoraphobia: its prevalence has had a boost that has led scholars to rescue works such as the The Haunting of Hill House which has been adapted on Netflix and directed by Mike Falanagan.
Your story The Lottery was the one that brought her to fame, it also made her receive more than ten letters a day where they congratulated her and even threatened her not to go near places because the story, a normalization of evil, seemed to them grotesque and frightening.
Jackson even signed that he couldn't stand people, "who think you start writing the moment you sit down at your desk and pick up your pen and finish writing when you leave it; a writer is always writing. Isolated from the world, she had to deal with her children and family life, which not infrequently became an obstacle.
Thanks to the subjects she addressed, the publishers of her time associated her novels with an author who practiced witchcraft, something that deeply annoyed the writer and yet she was convinced that she had suffered "magical" attacks of clairvoyance. Some of her characters spoke with cats and had great knowledge of herbalism. Although she didn't like the nickname her literature sublimated her life, it gave her the opportunity to escape the continuous confinement that brought her family life from where she fought to escape through her letters. He died of a heart attack when he was 48 years old.
