When “Life Among the Savages,” a collection of warm and funny magazine pieces chronicling the ups and downs of Shirley Jackson’s household, was first published in 1953, Jackson was already a well-known writer — of a rather different kind. She had made headlines five years earlier with “The Lottery,” which attracted attention not only for its shocking content, but also for the vehemence of the response it provoked. Many were unsure whether this tale of ritual stoning in an American village was fact or fiction; some railed at The New Yorker for printing such barbarism; others just wanted to know what on earth it meant. Jackson, who had already published the novel “The Road Through the Wall” (1948), about murder and suicide in a small California town, sealed her macabre reputation with her next two books: “The Lottery” (1949), a collection of often suspenseful short stories, and “Hangsaman” (1951), a coming-of-age novel about a college student who suffers a mental breakdown.

Now it’s not unusual for writers to offer glimpses of their personal lives, but “Savages” — which along with its sequel, “Raising Demons” (1957), has just been reissued by Penguin — provoked an outcry not unlike the reaction to “The Lottery.” Critics marveled that Jackson, about whom one reviewer had wryly remarked that she wrote “not with a pen but a broomstick,” was now spinning cheerful yarns about a visit to the department store, the night all the family members (even the dog) found themselves sleeping in the wrong beds or the time the furnace and the car both died while her husband was away on a business trip. One reviewer said he would have sooner expected Charles Addams to illustrate “Little Women” than Jackson to write “a cheerful book about family life.” Another noted with surprise that “The Lottery” was as different from “Savages” as “a thunderstorm from a zephyr.”

The shocked reviewers were mainly men. Readers of women’s magazines had already been following the misadventures of Jackson’s children for years. Only a few weeks after “The Lottery” came out, Mademoiselle published “Charles,” her first story of family life, an instant classic in which her son Laurie comes home from kindergarten each day with a new tale of some outrageous sin that his classmate Charles has committed: hitting the teacher, using bad language, talking back. Jackson, insatiably curious, cannot wait to meet the beleaguered mother of this imp at the next PTA meeting, but when she asks the kindergarten teacher to point her out, she gets a surprise. “Charles?” the teacher asks. “We don’t have any Charles in the kindergarten.” For the rest of her career, Jackson would continue to turn out both types of work simultaneously, alternating lighthearted family stories with her serious fiction.

These stories establish Jackson as an unlikely progenitor of today’s “mommy bloggers.” Before Jean Kerr or Erma Bombeck — two writers better known for their contributions in this genre — she pioneered the humorous, chatty, intelligently observed chronicle of life with children. Read today, her pieces feel surprisingly modern — mainly because Jackson refuses to sentimentalize or idealize motherhood. She admits to a “pang of honest envy” as her husband departs for a business trip; when the children misbehave in public, she disguises her frustration by smiling “sweetly and falsely.” Sometimes, she admits, she finds herself “open-mouthed and terrified” before these “little individual creatures moving solidly along in their own paths.” Their antics are not always adorable. Cheeky Laurie is apt to embarrass her by telling a breakfast caller that she is still asleep; Jannie refuses to go anywhere without a troop of imaginary friends, who she insists must all be addressed by name; Sally drives her mother to the brink of insanity with her “tuneful and unceasing conversation; part song, part story, part uncomplimentary editorial comment.” “Savages” ends with the birth of Barry, Jackson’s fourth and last child.