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Chargement... The Letters of Shirley Jacksonpar Shirley Jackson
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"Shirley Jackson is one of the most important American authors of the last hundred years and among our greatest writers of the female experience. This extraordinary compilation of personal correspondence has all the hallmarks of Jackson's beloved fiction, and also features family photographs and Shirley's own illustrations. Written over the course of nearly three decades, from Jackson's college years to three months before her premature death at the age of forty-eight, these letters become the autobiography Shirley Jackson never wrote, full of subversive wit, vivid imagination, and gorgeous prose. Jackson spent much of her adult life as a faculty wife and mother of four in Vermont, and the landscape here is the everyday: trips to the dentist and dream vacations, overdue taxes and broken Christmas tree bulbs, new dogs and new babies, fad diets and recipes for fudge. But in recounting these events to family, friends, and colleagues, she turns them into remarkable stories: entertaining, revealing, and wise. This intimate collection holds the beguiling prism of Shirley Jackson--writer and teacher, mother and daughter, neighbor and wife--up to the light"-- Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999Classification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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Jackson, the author of one of America's best-known short stories ("The Lottery") and the novels “The Haunting of Hill House” and “We Have Always Lived in the Castle,” was a natural, someone who could make anything interesting. Whether she was writing love letters to Stanley Hyman, her future husband, or letters to her parents (both of whom outlived her) or her literary agent, she was creative, imaginative and usually humorous.
"Shirley loved writing letters as much as she liked to write fiction," says her eldest son Laurence (often the subject of these letters), who edited this book. Her husband, himself a prominent literary critic and author, was the first to recognize their importance, and many of those blessed to receive her letters were encouraged to preserve them for the benefit of future biographers and readers.
In so many of these letters Jackson sounds like a typical New England housewife of her generation. She is occupied with her husband, her four children, preparing the next meal, paying bills between royalty checks and book advances and entertaining houseguests. They are so lively and gay that a reader must be alert for undercurrents suggesting that not everything is joyful and carefree in her life. She ate too much, drank too much, smoked too much and took too many drugs (legal and prescribed by her doctors, but still excessive). At times she was afraid to leave her own house. Only in her letters to Stanley, including those love letters, does she open up about his frequent unfaithfulness.
Like her contemporary, Flannery O'Connor (mentioned in these letters), Jackson was a gifted cartoonist, and many of her cartoons (most at her husband's expense) are included in the book.
The Hyman family seemed to depend on Shirley's sporadic income to survive, even though Stanley had a steady job teaching at Bennington College for most of these years. When a check did come in, they would often splurge on a new car or a new appliance, then wait for the next check. Even in middle age, Shirley was still receiving the occasional check from her parents. Both she and Stanley liked to gamble, perhaps another reason they were so often broke. Her stories usually sold quickly, and Stanley seems to have pressured her to keep churning them out so they could pay their bills.
Jackson's books, including the humorous ones she wrote about her own family, will be read for years to come. Add to that list this wonderful collection of her letters. ( )