On March 15, 2016, Ruth Franklin, a 2014-15 fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography.
As a Leon Levy Fellow, Ms. Franklin worked on a biography of the American writer Shirley Jackson, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. She has been a book critic and contributing editor at The New Republic and written for other publications including The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, Bookforum, Granta, and Salmagundi.
Shirley Jackson became famous in midcentury America for her short story “The Lottery,” which unnerved readers from the moment it appeared in the New Yorker in 1948, and for a string of gothic novels, as well as her cheerful yet brutally honest essays about juggling four kids, pets, a house, and a husband. In this biography, Ruth Franklin gets at what makes Jackson both sui generis and familiar. Jackson’s fiction, Franklin argues, deserves to be considered as part of the “vibrant and distinguished tradition that can be traced back to the American Gothic work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry James.” For more background click here.
