Shirley Jackson was born in San Francisco in 1916 to Leslie and Geraldine Jackson, a middle-class couple. When she was a teenager, her family moved to Rochester, New York, where Jackson graduated from Brighton High School in 1934. She attended the University of Rochester briefly, but then dropped out and ultimately received her bachelor's degree from Syracuse University. At Syracuse University, Jackson worked on the school newspaper, The Spectre, during which she met her future husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman.
After graduation, Jackson married Hyman and they moved to a rural area in Vermont, where they had four children. Jackson's novel Life Among the Savages (1953) is a humorous account of...