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The Haunting of Hill House
Shirley Jackson (1918–65) was one of the greatest American gothic writers of the 20th century – an heir to the tradition of Hawthorne and Poe. Jackson was brought up in California and educated in Syracuse, New York, where she met the man she would marry. The couple settled in North Bennington, Vermont, where Jackson spent the last 20 years of her life. Her career writing short stories was lucrative, and for some time she was highly regarded as the author of Life Among the Savages (1952), a witty fictionalised memoir about life as a mother; but this work has now been eclipsed by Jackson’s reputation as the author of horror and ghost-story masterpieces such as the controversial short work ‘The Lottery’ (1948, Folio 2025) and the novels The Haunting of Hill House (1959, Folio 2022) and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962, Folio 2023).
Joyce Carol Oates’ first novel, With Shuddering Fall, was published in 1964 when she was still in her twenties. Since then, she has published a further 57 novels as well as many books of short stories, poems, plays and nonfiction. Oates read widely in 19th-century fiction as a girl – and has cited Dostoyevsky as an early influence – before encountering classic works of modernism as a student at Syracuse University, all of which helped to shape her own writing. Her best-received fictions include the Wonderland Quartet (1967–71) – the third volume, Them, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1970 – and Blonde (2000), a fictional treatment of the life of Marilyn Monroe, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Oates taught writing at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014. Together with her first husband she founded and edited a literary magazine, the Ontario Review, and an associated publishing house. In 2010 she was presented with the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama. Oates wrote a new introduction for The Folio Society edition of The Best Short Stories of Fyodor Dostoyevsky in 2021.