[9] After publishing her debut novel, The Road Through the Wall (1948), a semi-autobiographical account of her childhood in California, Jackson gained significant public attention for her short story "The Lottery", which presents the sinister underside of a bucolic American village.

[13][b] Jackson was raised in Burlingame, California, an affluent suburb of San Francisco, where her family resided in a two-story home located at 1609 Forest View Road.

[15] Her relationship with her mother was strained, as her parents had married young and Geraldine had been disappointed when she immediately became pregnant with Shirley, as she had been looking forward to "spending time with her dashing husband".

[35]Jackson's maternal grandmother, nicknamed "Mimi", was a Christian Science practitioner who continued to practice spiritual healing on members of the family after her retirement.

Jackson was known to critically assess such attempts, recounting a time when Mimi claimed to have broken her leg and healed it through prayer overnight, though she had really only lightly sprained her ankle.

"[17] While she believed that religion could easily become a vehicle for harm, the religious influences from her childhood are clear in Jackson's writing, which includes themes of mysticism, mental power, and witchcraft.

[39] They had four children, Laurence (Laurie), Joanne (Jannie), Sarah (Sally), and Barry, who later achieved their own brand of literary fame as fictionalized versions of themselves in their mother's short stories.

For examples of her wit, he refers readers to her many humorous cartoons, one of which depicts a husband cautioning a wife not to carry heavy things during pregnancy, but not offering to help.

[44] The story prompted over 300 letters from readers,[45] many of them outraged at its conjuring of a dark aspect of human nature,[44] characterized by, as Jackson put it, "bewilderment, speculation, and old-fashioned abuse".

[46] In the July 22, 1948, issue of the San Francisco Chronicle, Jackson offered the following in response to persistent queries from her readers about her intentions: "Explaining just what I had hoped the story to say is very difficult.

I suppose I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village, to shock the story's readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.

[49] Jackson's second novel, Hangsaman (1951), contained elements similar to the mysterious real-life December 1, 1946, disappearance of an 18-year-old Bennington College sophomore Paula Jean Welden.

This event, which remains unsolved to this day, took place in the wooded wilderness of Glastenbury Mountain near Bennington in southern Vermont, where Jackson and her family were living at the time.

[50][51] The event also served as inspiration for her short story "The Missing Girl" (first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1957, and posthumously in Just an Ordinary Day [1996]).

[48] Semi-fictionalized versions of her marriage and the experience of bringing up four children, these works are "true-to-life funny-housewife stories" of the type later popularized by such writers as Jean Kerr and Erma Bombeck during the 1950s and 1960s.

I was married in 1940 to Stanley Edgar Hyman, critic and numismatist, and we live in Vermont, in a quiet rural community with fine scenery and comfortably far away from city life.

The children are Laurence, Joanne, Sarah, and Barry: my books include three novels, The Road Through the Wall, Hangsaman, The Bird's Nest and a collection of short stories, The Lottery.

Describing the bewildered response of The New Yorker readers to 'The Lottery,' she notes, 'The number of people who expected Mrs. Hutchinson to win a Bendix washing machine at the end would amaze you.

[58] The novel, which interpolated supernatural phenomena with psychology,[59] went on to become a critically esteemed example of the haunted house story,[44][60] described by Joanne Harris as "not only the best haunted-house story ever written, but also a quiet subversion of the ingénue trope in horror fiction, with a nod to Sartre's Huis Clos with its toxic menage a trois"[61] and by Stephen King as one of the most important horror novels of the twentieth century.

[64] Near the end of her life, Jackson also saw a psychiatrist for severe anxiety that had kept her housebound for extended periods of time, a problem worsened by a diagnosis of colitis, which made it physically difficult to travel even short distances from her home.

[70] The psychological aspects of her illness responded well to therapy, and by 1964 she began to resume normal activities, including a round of speaking engagements at writers' conferences, as well as planning a new novel titled Come Along with Me, which was to be a major departure from the style and subject matter of her previous works.

[74] In 1968, Jackson's husband released a posthumous volume of her work, Come Along with Me, containing her unfinished last novel, as well as 14 previously uncollected short stories (among them "Louisa, Please Come Home") and three lectures she gave at colleges or writers' conferences in her last years.

[89][90][91] In 2014, Susan Scarf Merrell published a well-received thriller, Shirley: A Novel, about Jackson, her husband, a fictional couple who move in with them, and a missing girl.

[96] Jackson has been cited as an influence on a diverse set of authors, including Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Sarah Waters, Nigel Kneale, Claire Fuller, Joanne Harris,[97] and Richard Matheson.

[108] Hyman insisted that the dark visions found in Jackson's work were not, as some critics claimed, the product of "personal, even neurotic, fantasies", but, rather, comprised "a sensitive and faithful anatomy" of the Cold War era in which she lived, "fitting symbols for [a] distressing world of the concentration camp and the Bomb".

[109] Jackson may even have taken pleasure in the subversive impact of her work, as indicated by Hyman's statement that she "was always proud that the Union of South Africa banned 'The Lottery', and she felt that they at least understood the story".