While acknowledging the importance of your essay (and subsequent biography), what has changed in the culture so that Jackson is now widely considered a mainstream literary figure? Library of America: Ten years after your influential New Republic essay and the first Library of America Jackson volume, the Shirley Jackson revival has become a full-blown renaissance that spills over into pop culture. Shirley Jackson in 1951, the year Hangsaman was published. A critic and frequent contributor to The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books and other publications, Franklin is also the author of A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction (2011). The new book’s editor is Ruth Franklin, who played a major role in the Jackson revival herself with her 2016 biography Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, for which she received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Four Novels of the 1940s & 50s follows by exactly ten years Library of America’s first Shirley Jackson collection, Novels & Stories, which helped consolidate a major reevaluation of Jackson’s literary reputation and firmly established her as the twentieth-century heir to Poe, Hawthorne, and the Henry James of “The Turn of the Screw.”
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