Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

Instantly heralded for its "masterful" and "thrilling" portrayal (Boston Globe), Shirley Jackson reveals the tumultuous life and inner darkness of the literary genius behind such classics as "The Lottery" and The Haunting of Hill House. In this "remarkable act of reclamation" (Neil Gaiman), Ruth Franklin envisions Jackson as "belonging to the great tradition of Hawthorne, Poe and James" (New York Times Book Review) and demonstrates how her unique contribution to the canon "so uncannily channeled women's nightmares and contradictions that it is "nothing less than the secret history of American women of her era'" (Washington Post). Franklin investigates the "interplay between the life, the work, and the times with real skill and insight, making this fine book a real contribution not only to biography, but to mid-20th-century women's history" (Chicago Tribune). "Wisely rescu[ing] Shirley Jackson from any semblance of obscurity" (Lena Dunham), Franklin's invigorating portrait stands as the definitive biography of a generational avatar and an American literary genius.
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Short-listed for Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award 2017

“"With this welcome new biography Franklin makes a thoughtful and persuasive case for Jackson as a serious and accomplished literary artist. . . . [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."”

"... lively and authoritative new biography." -- The Economist
"This new biography... could not be more welcome or timely... Her [Ruth Franklin's] critical grasp of Jackson's oeuvre is superlative and you do not doubt a word she says: this is most definitely an exhaustive biography." -- Julie Myerson - The Spectator
"Franklin has gained access to a trove of new material including a fascinating correspondence between Jackson and a housewife fan in the early 1960s. Our sense of there being "two Shirleys" is not encouraged by the author, who makes a convincing case for seeing the two personas instead as "profoundly interconnected"." -- The Times Literary Supplement
"Franklin’s masterful biography, deeply researched and warmly sympathetic to its subject, paints a different picture, successfully marrying the various elements of Jackson’s personality – writer and homemaker, gifted literary author and popular mummy-blogger memoirist." -- Literary Review
"... sympathetic and fair-minded biography…" -- The Guardian
"Franklin... gives equal weight to Jackson’s life and work in this groundbreaking new biography." -- Jane Ciabattari, The 10 Best Books of 2016 - BBC Culture
"...Ruth Franklin skilfully and with great verve and readability paints a portrait of a woman with many faces in this slick and stylish biography." -- The Mail on Sunday
"Ruth Franklin’s Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life is a richly satisfying biography: capacious, incisive, and full of surprising insights into the legacy of this “Virginia Werewolf among the séance-fiction writers” (as a short-sighted mid-century writer once dubbed her)." -- Kate Bolick, Our Favourite Books of 2016 - The Irish Times
"... enjoyable biography..." -- Dan Jones - The Times
"In her biography...Ruth Franklin plays down the broomstick tag and skilfully unpicks the threads of Jackson's life and works." -- The Arts Desk
"... gloriously comprehensive book." -- SciFi Now
"... a wonderful, intriguing, warmhearted biography of the author of The Lottery. Franklin, like her subject, is just so darned readable..." -- The Bookseller
"This is a skilled and deeply researched portrait of a curious woman and accomplished writer who retains the power to torment and unsettle readers..." -- The Times
"Franklin’s biography looks at the inner darkness that fuelled a unique literary talent." -- The Telegraph
"For many readers, Jackson is the best of all horror writers, a master of tension and unravelling sanity. In the biography Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, Ruth Franklin unravels some of the myths that surrounded the writer and also shows us a picture of a life that in some ways contains many of the things Jackson was writing about. Plagued with a fear of the outside world and an obsessive, panicked need to write, Jackson at times appears as one of her own characters – paranoid, compulsive, afraid." -- Daisy Johnson, Further Reading: Horror Books - The Guardian

Ruth Franklin is a book critic and frequent contributor to The New Yorker, Harper’s, and many other publications. A recipient of a New York Public Library Cullman Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, she lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Winner National Book Critics Circle Award (Biography) Winner Edgar Award (Critical/Biographical) Winner * Bram Stoker Award (Nonfiction) A New York Times Notable Book A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Pick of the Year Named one of the Best Books of the Year by Entertainment Weekly, NPR, TIME, Boston Globe, NYLON, San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Times, Kirkus Reviews, and BooklistIn this "thoughtful and persuasive" biography, award-winning biographer Ruth Franklin establishes Shirley Jackson as a "serious and accomplished literary artist" (Charles McGrath, New York Times Book Review).

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