Ruth Franklin is a book critic and former editor at The New Republic. Her first biography, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2016) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography and was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2016, a Time magazine top nonfiction book of 2016, and a “best book of 2016” by The Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, and others. Franklin’s work appears in many publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, and Harper’s. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in biography, a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library, a Leon Levy Fellowship in biography, and the Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism. Her first book, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction (Oxford University Press, 2011), was a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

THE HAUNTED LIFE OF SHIRLEY JACKSON: A CONVERSATION WITH RUTH FRANKLIN

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 15TH | 5PM

Who can forget the chilling conclusion to Shirley Jackson's The Lottery? What was her source of inspiration — and how did the master of gothic horror come to craft such twisted tales of domestic life? Former editor at the New Republic Ruth Franklin has the answers, as she uncovers it all her new National Book Critics Circle Award-winning biography, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. Franklin will explore just how haunted Jackson's life was — while repositioning her as a major artist within the literary canon. This event is proudly presented by Festival Sponsor Harrisburg University of Science and Technology. 

Ruth Franklin will be available to sign copies of her book immediately following the discussion. 

PRAISE FOR SHIRLEY JACKSON: A RATHER HAUNTED LIFE

“Ruth Franklin’s sympathetic and masterful biography both uncovers Jackson’s secret and haunting life and repositions her as a major artist whose fiction so uncannily channeled women’s nightmares and contradictions that it is ‘nothing less than the secret history of American women of her era.’”
- Elaine Showalter, Washington Post

“With this welcome new biography Franklin makes a thoughtful and persuasive case for Jackson as a serious and accomplished literary artist. . . . [Franklin] sees Jackson not as an oddball, one-off writer of horror tales and ghost stories but as someone belonging to the great tradition of Hawthorne, Poe and James, writers preoccupied, as she was, with inner evil in the human soul.”
- Charles McGrath, New York Times Book Review