[3] According to Shirley Jackson's biographers, her marriage was plagued by Hyman's infidelities, notably with his former students, and she reluctantly agreed to his proposition of maintaining an open relationship.
He wrote, "I think that the future will find her powerful visions of suffering and inhumanity increasingly significant and meaningful, and that Shirley Jackson's work is among that small body of literature produced in our time that seems apt to survive.
Three months after Hyman's death from a suspected heart attack on July 29, 1970,[1] she gave birth to his last child, a son named Malcolm (1970–2009), who became a research fellow in the Department of Classics at Harvard University and later at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.
[7][citation needed] Although more likely to be remembered today as the husband of Jackson (he edited a posthumous collection of her work),[8] Hyman was influential in the development of literary theory during the 1940s and 1950s.
[citation needed] Hyman was also a noted jazz critic, who wrote hundreds of essays on the subject in addition to his career as a writer and teacher.