Children of the late Shirley Jackson publish early story
Laurence Hyman, son of the late Shirley Jackson, has been on a quest for more than 20 years.
Jackson was just 48 when she died, in 1965, and left behind an extensive backlog of unreleased material. Her husband, the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, made little effort to organize her papers beyond giving them to the Library of Congress, so Hyman and his sister, Sarah Hyman DeWitt, took on the job. They have made several trips to Washington, sorting through boxes and sometimes finding sections of a given work in different piles, a process especially time consuming because Shirley Jackson rarely dated her manuscripts.
Hyman, who manages his mother’s estate, has co-edited two posthumous collections of her stories and other writings and otherwise seen her reputation soar well beyond being the author of “The Lottery.” Two volumes of her fiction have been issued by the country’s unofficial canon maker, the Library of America, and Jackson was the subject of an award-winning biography by Ruth Franklin. Hyman says at least 10 film or television adaptations are in the works, along with stage productions, a multimedia project by composer Ryan Scott Oliver and a collection of her letters that is scheduled for 2021.
“There is still material we haven’t gotten to,” Hyman told The Associated Press.
Meanwhile, an early story never published before, “Adventure On a Bad Night,” appears this week in the new issue of Strand Magazine. “Adventure On a Bad Night” was likely written during World War II or shortly after, Hyman says. It’s a brief sketch about a housewife named Vivien who takes a needed break to go out and buy cigarettes. She meets a heavily pregnant woman who seems to have an Italian accent and is being shunned by the store clerk as she attempts to send a telegram. Vivien helps out and the woman responds by paying for her cigarettes.
Laurence Hyman called Jackson’s work a “a personal view of the female experience in the 1940s and 1950s, when women were expected to be housewives, and happy to be.