After an ill-fated return to Syracuse bookended by two abortive sojourns in a rustic cabin in rural New Hampshire, they came back to the city shortly before Laurence, their first child, was born in October 1942. Like so many would-be writers of their day, the couple set up house in Greenwich Village, but both initially stagnated in menial jobs. Marriage came in August 1940, shortly after Jackson and Hyman graduated from Syracuse University. “I understand she’s trying to have both a marriage and a career,” one says to the other. A muscular woman, looking disgruntled, drags her husband off by his hair as another couple look on worriedly. A drawing she made during the early years of her career brings it into relief. The tension between the two roles - both internal and external, based simultaneously in her expectations for herself and in the expectations of her husband, family, publishers, and readers - animates all her writing. In addition to being a talented, determined, ambitious writer in an era when it was still unusual for a woman to have both a family and a profession, Jackson was a mother who tried to keep up the appearance of running a conventional American household (at least for the sake of the material it generated) while making space for her own creative life amid her bustling family. Yet the clerk’s assessment was not entirely inaccurate.
The idea that she was ever “just a housewife” sounds crudely reductionist.
During her lifetime, she was equally well known for her best-selling memoirs about her boisterous family, which included four children, a menagerie of pets, and - not incidentally - her husband, literary critic and Bennington faculty member Stanley Edgar Hyman. In addition to “The Lottery,” one of the most anthologized stories in American fiction, she has been most celebrated for The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), masterpieces in the American Gothic tradition of Hawthorne and Poe. Between 1941, when her first story appeared in The New Republic, and her premature death of heart failure in 1965 at age 48, Jackson published six novels and dozens of stories that count as some of the most original, indelible fiction of her time.
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