‘The Letters of Shirley Jackson’ gives glimpse into the personal life of famed author

Author Shirley Jackson, best-known for her sly and sinister short story “The Lottery” and the novel “The Haunting of Hill House,” wrote many other things, including humorous essays about family life.

And she wrote letters — a steady stream of witty, insightful missives to her parents, agents, editors and friends. There were notes about trifling domestic matters at home, her literary works in progress and practically everything else in between.

Jackson died in 1965 at age 48, but many of her letters remain. Her son, Laurence Hyman of Occidental, has spent the last five years compiling and editing them into book form.

This is no amateur family scrapbook. “The Letters of Shirley Jackson,” published July 13 by Random House in New York, runs 630 pages and features 38 drawings and 300 letters by Jackson, culled from a mountain of about 500 items from her decades of continuous correspondence.

“Random House wanted me to edit the letters for a popular audience, not a literary audience,” Hyman said. “The thing that came through to me was my mother’s sense of humor. She wrote short stories about family mishaps during the 1950s and ’60s for magazines like Good Housekeeping, Mademoiselle, Charm and The New Yorker.”

The one thing Jackson never wanted to write was her own life story, including her interesting beginnings as a debutante in San Francisco. Even when asked by editors to supply a biography, she only managed to squeeze out the briefest of notes, her son said.

“She was unable to write about herself. She didn’t know how, so that’s what makes the collection of letters in this book so necessary,” Hyman said. “In her letters, she was basically writing her autobiography. None of this has ever been published before, so it’s basically hundreds of pages of new writing by Shirley Jackson.”

The letters offer new insight into how the author worked and thought, her son said. Writing from her home in Bennington, Vermont, where her husband, Stanley Hyman, taught literature at Bennington College, Jackson shared her thoughts in a very personal way.

“She opened up her thinking process,” Hyman said. “I discovered things about my mother I didn’t know. I knew she wrote every day, but I didn’t realize how hard she worked at her writing. She would create a map of a village where the story took place or a diagram of where the characters sat at dinner.”

While pursuing her successful writing career, Jackson also raised four children, and the mundane is mixed with the literary in many of her letters.

For example, there’s this letter to her parents from Sept. 5, 1960, written in her customary lowercase style:

“dear mother and pop, this being labor day, i am in the last stages of the confusion of school clothes and laundry.”

Hyman collaborated on the book with Bernice Murphy, associate professor in popular literature at the School of English at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. Murphy previously edited the collection “Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy.”

He also had help from his wife, Cynthia Kane Hyman, who didn’t live to see the book published. She died June 13 of cancer.

“Cynthia was my main supporter,” Hyman said. “She read all of the letters.”

The book already has received enthusiastic reviews from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, as well as this assessment by bestselling novelist Jonathan Lethem:

“The breadth of Shirley Jackson’s artistry is still being recognized. This intimate collection of her correspondence makes us feel the odds against which this working mother, daughter and wife accomplished what she did, and at what costs. This book is surely as much a feminist document as a literary one.”

Nearly six decades after her death, Jackson’s work continues to draw attention from readers, scholars and even filmmakers, who have adapted several of her stories for the screen. Last year, Elisabeth Moss portrayed the author in the film “Shirley,” based on a fictional interpretation of Jackson’s life.

“There are new Shirley Jackson readers today, especially in Europe. England seems to have rediscovered her, even though she’s always been popular there,” Hyman said. “Her books have been translated into 72 languages. There’s even an edition in Bosnia.”

You can reach Staff Writer Dan Taylor at dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com or 707-521-5243. On Twitter @danarts.