Shirley Jackson was best known for literary suspense in the tradition of Hawthorne, Poe and Henry James. Her 1948 story The Lottery is a horror classic, as are her novels The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962). But Jackson’s unique contribution, writes Franklin, was “her primary focus” on the lives of her generation of women who were raised in the mid 20th Century. Franklin tracks Jackson’s mythmaking life from her girlhood in a northern Californian suburb through her marriage to literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, with whom she had four children. They met at Syracuse University, where he began a lifetime of infidelities. “Their sometimes tortured intimacy reverberates seismically through her work,” writes Franklin, who gives equal weight to Jackson’s life and work in this groundbreaking new biography. (Credit: Liveright)