Shirley Jackson

Shirley Jackson was a horror and Mystery writer born in San Francisco, California in 1916.

She is best remembered for her unsettling novel of paranoia and the supernatural, 'The Haunting of Hill House' (1959) and her terrifying short story 'The Lottery' (1948), a horror tale rife with symbolism that is still puzzled over by critics and academics to this day. 'The Lottery' is regarded as an American Classic and as one of the best pieces of short fiction in the history of American Literature. Jackson was publishing around the same time as fellow genre writers Ray Bradbury, Jack Finney, and Richard Matheson and is regarded by many - including Stephen King - as being one of the most influential writers of Mystery, the occult, and Gothic horror.

In a 1960 lecture that was included in her collection "Come Along With Me", published in 1968, Jackson described the voluminous and vociferous reaction that the "New Yorker" magazine received after publishing her sinister short story "The Lottery" in 1948. She said that one of the most common questions she received from readers, especially early on (before the story had gotten its many dramatizations and re-publications) was, "Where these lotteries were held, and whether they could go there and watch".

Her books have been adapted to film and include The Haunting (1963), The Lottery (1996), and The Haunting (1999) by Jan de Bont.

She is arguably most famous for her short story "The Lottery" (filmed as The Lottery (1996)), a dark and sinister tale about an annual game-ritual that takes place each year in a small village with a population circa 300. Whoever draws the final black spot is sacrificed in order to ensure a good harvest the following year. The story has been both lauded and condemned, but is nevertheless regarded as one of the best short stories in 20th-century American Literature.