Shirley Jackson’s biographer on the writer’s ability to find evil in the ordinary

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Books, Arts

4.2 • 672 Ratings

🗓️ 29 October 2025

⏱️ 9 minutes

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Summary

With stories like “The Lottery” and The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson was one of the great horror authors of the 20th century. In 2012, Ruth Franklin wrote a biography of the writer called Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. In today’s episode, we revisit a conversation between Franklin and NPR’s Linda Wertheimer. They talk about Jackson’s childhood, domestic life, and her unique ability to see "extraordinary evil” under the surface of ordinary life.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's NPR's book of the day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. I was in middle school when I first read
0:07.9	Shirley Jackson's The Lottery. I remember feeling genuinely freaked out and scared and looking
0:14.4	around at the other kids who were just as spooked as I was. It's kind of incredible that a writer
0:20.1	could have that kind of power to
0:21.9	scare a bunch of kids who were sitting in a well-lit classroom in the middle of an otherwise
0:27.1	ordinary school day. But Jackson's biographer, Ruth Franklin, says Jackson's gift was
0:33.0	seeing evil in the quote, most mundane circumstances. Franklin's book, Shirley Jackson,
0:39.4	A Rather Haunted Life, came out in 2016, and she spoke with NPR's Linda Wertheimer about
0:44.3	how Jackson's difficult childhood and her overall unhappiness with her home life fed into her
0:51.5	horrific fiction. That's coming up.
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1:14.4	Shirley Jackson was a fairly famous writer in her short life.
1:18.7	She wrote a number of novels, two of them bestsellers, one nominated for the National Book Award. Probably the most famous book was called The Haunting of Hill House, published
1:24.7	in 1959, but about a decade earlier, she wrote a short story for the
1:30.1	New Yorker magazine, which started conversations all over the country. The story was called The Lottery.
1:37.5	There's a new biography of Shirley Jackson by Ruth Franklin. Franklin is a critic and writer
1:43.2	whose work has also been published in the New Yorker
1:45.9	magazine. The book is called Shirley Jackson A Rather Haunted Life. Ruth Franklin joins us from our
1:53.2	studios in New York City. Thank you for doing this. My pleasure. So Ruth Franklin, why did you feel
1:59.3	this was a time to write about Shirley Jackson? She's been dead for 50 years. Her work is still mostly in print, so she's not been forgotten. But I think you'd have to go to someone my age to hear how shocking some of her writing was at the time it was published, something like the lottery.
	...

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