Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

October 29, 2020 — Known to millions for her classic story “The Lottery,” Shirley Jackson took the American gothic tradition of Poe, Hawthorne, and Lovecraft and brought it down to earth in novels and stories that brilliantly plumbed the dark underside of the conformist postwar decades. Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin, editor of Library of America’s Shirley Jackson: Four Novels of the 1940s and 50s, joins novelist and literary critic Francine Prose and playwright John Guare for a pre-Halloween conversation about one of our most haunting writers. Presented in partnership with the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers