![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() His respectability abided, however, and Shirley Jackson’s mother and bête noire, Geraldine, was an immaculately conventional woman who, in the words of her granddaughter, “wanted a pretty little girl, and what she got was a lumpish redhead.” A lumpish redhead who, despite formidable quirks, longed for acceptance from Geraldine and people like her. Bugbee, was an eminent San Francisco architect who built robber-baron castles on Nob Hill, all of which were destroyed in the great earthquake of 1906. Perhaps our greatest 20th-century author of what may be called Gothic fiction-though Jackson (1916-65) hardly fits that or any other pigeonhole-came from well-to-do people in California. When she got home, she put away her groceries and began typing her most famous story, “The Lottery” (1948), about a public stoning in a village very like North Bennington. She’d been reading a book about human sacrifice and wondered who in her prosaic village would be a good candidate for that sort of thing. One morning in North Bennington, Vt.-where most of the townsfolk regarded her as a bit of an oddball-Shirley Jackson was pushing her daughter in a stroller on the way to the grocery store. ![]()
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