Shirley Jackson

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Shirley Jackson (born December 14, 1916 in San Francisco , † August 8, 1965 in North Bennington , Vermont ) was an American writer who was mainly known for her horror novels and stories such as the multi-filmed Haunted Hill House and The Lottery got known.

Life

Studies and literary debut

After attending school, Shirley Jackson studied at Syracuse University and graduated in 1940 with a Bachelor of Arts (BA). She made her literary debut in 1943 with the short story After You, My Dear Alphonse in The New Yorker magazine . In the following years, other short stories appeared regularly in this magazine and in the women's magazines McCall’s , The Ladies' Home Journal and Redbook , but also in The Saturday Evening Post and Harper's Bazaar . Her first book, The Road Through the Wall , was published in 1948 and was about her childhood on the west coast of the United States .

Shirley Jackson had been married to Stanley Edgar Hyman, a literary critic and professor at Bennington College, since 1940 and had four children with him. In an interview, she said that despite her writing career, the focus is always on family, raising children, and the household, and writing only makes up fifty percent of her life.

plant

Shirley Jackson wrote in various genres: On the one hand, she was able to describe the ease and confusion of normal domestic life with an unprejudiced serenity; on the other hand, she wrote horror stories in which abnormal behaviors appear normal. In each genre, however, she wrote with remarkable rigor and economy of writing style.

Autobiographical

Jackson wrote several autobiographical novels. Two books are about her family's life in North Bennington: Life Among the Savages (1953) and Raising Demons (1957). Orville Prescott, a literary critic of the daily newspaper The New York Times wrote about Life Among the Savages , he was laughing so much while reading that he had tears in his eyes and stop needed.

fiction

The fictional stories depict a perception of the uncanny that stems from Jackson's studies of social anthropology and magic . Her works in this field include Hangsaman (1951), The Bird's Nest (1954), The Sundial (1958) and The Haunting of Hill House (1959, Spuk in Hill House ). These novels are about a girl suffering from a severe case of multiple personalities , the nature of horror and hauntings in a house, a girl's imagination and the end of the natural world. In the novel The Sundial there is a reference to her own view of humanity in which one of the characters notes, 'You all want the whole world to be changed so you will be different. But I don't suppose people get changed any by just a new world. And anyway that world isn't any more real than this one. ' ("You all want the whole world to change so that you will be different. I do not assume, however, that people change themselves only through a changed world. And anyway, one world is no more real than the other. ")

Among her works, the short story The Lottery , first published in 1948 in The New Yorker magazine, was the best known and at the same time the most unfathomable for the reader. This story describes, with increasing tension, an annual lottery that is held to choose a ritual annual sacrifice among the inhabitants of a village. The short story takes up the classic theme of man's inhumanity towards others and gives him the additional element of chance.

After publication, the magazine received hundreds of letters to the editor, almost without exception asking about the meaning of the short story. Jackson himself received more than three hundred such letters, only thirteen of which were in a friendly tone, most of them from friends. Many readers thought the transfer of an ancient ritual into the present was real and asked where this custom still existed.

→ Main article: The Lottery

Other stories and novels of a similar nature gave the impression that Shirley Jackson was essentially a moralist who described that cruel and lustful behavior was not far below the surface of those who described themselves as normal and decent, and society with inquisitorial Cruelty against individuals who they consider strange. The harmless eccentric, as Jackson said in an interview, can be banned and killed with the same severity as it is normally reserved for overt enemies of society.

Her last book We Have Always Lived in the Castle (German: We have always lived in the castle ) (1962) was adapted as a stage play for Broadway .

→ Main article: We have always lived in the castle

Shirley Jackson Eliot Fremont-Smith, according to a reviewer of the Times , represented "an important literary influence" through her horror stories, which are regarded as wonderfully crafted cool classics or as macabre comments on human sanity influence ').

'She was a master of complexity of mood, an ironic explorer of the dark, conflicting inner tyrannies of the mind and soul, she left the flourishes - or rather, directed them - to the reader's imagination.' ("She was a master of the intertwining of moods, an ironic explorer of the dark, contradicting inner tyrannies of mind and soul. She left the flourishes to the reader's imagination, or rather, directed them towards them.")

Jackson is considered an important representative of slipstream literature, especially with the short story collection The Lottery and Other Stories .

Films and awards

The Haunting of Hill House has been filmed several times: On the one hand by Robert Wise in 1963 under the title Until the Blood Freezes with Julie Harris and Claire Bloom , on the other hand in 1999 by Jan de Bont under the title The Ghost Castle with Lili Taylor and Liam Neeson in the leading roles . On October 12, 2018, the streaming provider Netflix also published the ten-part series Spuk in Hill House, based on the novel .

Michael Douglas ' production company Further Films secured the rights for a screen adaptation of We Have Always Lived in the Castle in 2009 . The filming of We Have Always Lived in the Castle directed by Stacie Passon was published 2018th The script was written by Mark Kruger with the assistance of Jackson's son Laurence Hyman. The leading roles were played by Sebastian Stan as Charles, Taissa Farmiga as Merricat, Alexandra Daddario as Constance and Crispin Glover as Uncle Julian.

In 1966, Shirley Jackson posthumously received the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Short Story for The Possibility of Evil .

German translations

While the family story Life Among the Savages appeared in German translation in 1954 by Heinrich Droste Verlag under the title Not von Bad Eltern , the fictional works were only translated into German in the late 1980s and early 1990s and published by Diogenes Verlag . In German translations published by Diogenes Verlag We have always lived in the castle ( We have always lived in the castle , 1988), the short story collection The Devil's Bride (1989) w ell The Hanged Man ( Hangsaman , 1992).

literature

Web links and sources

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jackson himself claimed to be born in 1919. See The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction . 3rd edition (online edition), version dated August 10, 2018.
  2. ^ Ruth Franklin: "The Lottery" Letters . June 25, 2013, ISSN  0028-792X ( newyorker.com [accessed October 2, 2019]).
  3. ↑ A Working Canon of Slipstream Writings , compiled at Readercon July 18, 2007 (PDF), accessed on October 5, 2018.
  4. ^ Joe Otterson: 'Haunting of Hill House' Series in the Works at Netflix. In: variety.com. April 10, 2017, accessed September 27, 2017 .
  5. ↑ Steven Zeitchik (AP): Further film visits the 'Castle'. In: The Hollywood Reporter. August 17, 2009, accessed May 13, 2019 .
  6. ↑ Borys Kit: Alexandra Daddario, Taissa Farmiga Join Sebastian Stan in 'We Have Always Lived in the Castle'. In: The Hollywood Reporter. August 10, 2016, accessed on May 13, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Jackson, Shirley
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH December 14, 1916
PLACE OF BIRTH San Francisco
DATE OF DEATH August 8, 1965
Place of death North Bennington , Vermont