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"THE HAUNTING OF SHIRLEY JACKSON"
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"Jackson made a lifelong study of witchcraft, experimenting with voodoo dolls, tarot cards, charms and incantations. Haunted houses fascinated her;
''The Haunting of Hill House'' was her most successful novel. In the words of one son:
''she didn't just think, she knew that there were other forces - demons, ghosts, psychic powers - and that she had been in touch with them since birth."
Her best work played with the nature of reality - teasing and prodding it as if it were a small animal - while she herself looked on, with fear, interest, vast amusement, the way she looked on life itself."nytimes
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In 1959, she published
The Haunting of Hill House, a supernatural horror novel widely considered to be one of the best ghost stories ever written
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Video from The Haunting
(Of Hill House) 1963
Jackson encouraged an occult atmosphere around her; she surrounded herself with a collection of amulets and charms
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Shirley Hardie Jackson (December 14, 1916 – August 8, 1965) was an American writer known primarily for her works of horror and mystery.
She was of English ancestry.
Over the duration of her writing career, which spanned over two decades, she composed six novels, two memoirs, and more than 200 short stories.
Shirley Jackson, 1916-1965, one of the most brilliant and influential authors of the twentieth century, is widely acclaimed for her stories and novels.
During her senior year of high school, the Jackson family relocated to Rochester,
New York,
after which she attended
Brighton High School, receiving her diploma in 1934.
She then attended the nearby University of Rochester
Jackson was unhappy in her classes there,and took a year-long hiatus from her studies before transferring to Syracuse University,
Here she received her bachelor's degree in journalism wikipedia
Rochester ny Influences
Shirley Jackson in Love & Death | Joyce Carol Oates - The New York Review of ...
"In their sprawling and eclectic library were hundreds of books on witchcraft, the occult, and spiritualism,
a particular interest of Jackson's"
.
The Fox sisters were three sisters from Rochester, New York who played an important role in the creation of Spiritualism)
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Rochester, NY - Monument to the Founders of Spiritualism
The birth of American Spiritualism is forever linked to Rochester, when sisters Margaret and Catherine Fox claimed the ability to communicate with departed…
Links:
The author, Shirley Jackson, has even been praised by Stephen King ... the occult,” and she was known to read Tarot cards for her friends
The Haunted Mind of Shirley Jackson-New Yorker Magazine
A new biography explores one of the twentieth century’s most tortured writers
" Here’s how not to be taken seriously as a woman writer:
Use demons and ghosts and other gothic paraphernalia in your fiction. Describe yourself publicly as 'a practicing amateur witch' and boast about the hexes you have placed on prominent publishers."
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Various critics have drawn parallels between her stories and the sociological reality of the time, yet fail to consider her stories as significant turning points in feminist literature: not only did Shirley Jackson's works reflect women's attitudes in the 1950s, they were also among the first of many feminist writings ...
6 Famous Writers Inspired by the Occult: Shirley Jackson
"She is an authority on witchcraft and magic, has a remarkable private library of works in English on the subject, and is perhaps the only contemporary writer who is a practicing amateur witch, specializing in small-scale black magic and fortune-telling with a Tarot deck "
Bibliography
- The Road Through the Wall (Farrar, Straus, 1948)
- Hangsaman (Farrar, Straus and Young, 1951)
- The Bird's Nest (Farrar, Straus and Young, 1954)
- The Sundial (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1958)
- The Haunting of Hill House (Viking, 1959)
- We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Viking, 1962)
- Shirley Jackson: Four Novels of the 1940s & 50s, ed. Ruth Franklin (Library of America, 2020)
- The Lottery and Other Stories (Farrar, Straus, 1949)
- The Magic of Shirley Jackson (ed. Stanley Edgar Hyman; Farrar, Straus, 1966)
- Come Along with Me: Part of a Novel, Sixteen Stories, and Three Lectures (ed. Stanley Edgar Hyman; Viking, 1968)
- Just an Ordinary Day (ed. Laurence & Sarah Hyman; Bantam, 1996)
- Shirley Jackson: Novels & Stories (ed. Joyce Carol Oates; Library of America, 2010)
- Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings (ed. Laurence & Sarah Hyman; Random House, 2015)
- Dark Tales (Penguin, 2016)
- More: wikipedia.org/
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PDF
Occult Influences in
Shirley Jackson's The Lottery
[The book excerpt at top is adapted from ''Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson'' by Judy Oppenheimer, to be published this month by G. P. Putnam's Sons.]
Links:
Feminist writings on DK
Andrea Dworkin
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