A Bennington Historical Society Presentation

Shirley Jackson, perhaps the greatest writer of the horror/gothic fiction genre in 20th-century America, lived and worked for most of her renowned literary career, from 1945 until her untimely death in 1965, in North Bennington. She rose to national prominence in 1948 with the publication of her chilling short story “The Lottery,” about which she explained, “I suppose I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village, to shock the story’s readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.”

Jackson’s eldest son, Laurence Hyman, has recently gifted a large collection of Jackson’s writings and personal effects to Bennington Museum. This presentation will feature Jamie Franklin, Bennington Museum’s Director of Collections and Exhibitions, and Laurence Hyman, in a conversation about Jackson’s literary legacy, focusing on items from the collection and her local ties.

Laurence Jackson Hyman is an editor, writer, photographer, publisher, film producer and jazz musician. The eldest son of Shirley Jackson and Stanley Edgar Hyman, he grew up in North Bennington, Vermont, where he attended high school and later graduated from Bennington College in 1964. His childhood was immortalized in many of his mother’s published short stories and two humorous books about the family: Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons. Currently he manages the Shirley Jackson literary estate and recently served as the editor of The Letters of Shirley Jackson.

Jamie Franklin has been curator at the Bennington Museum since 2005. His scholarship has focused on American art of the early to mid-20th century, with a particular emphasis on the intersection of modernism and self-taught art. He has organized exhibitions and written books, essays and articles featuring artists and topics including Erastus Salisbury Field, Grassroots Art, Impressionism, Rockwell Kent, Anna Mary Robertson Grandma Moses, and Alice Neel. His 2014 exhibition Alice Neel/Erastus Salisbury Field: Painting the People was recognized by the Wall Street Journal as one of the most memorable exhibitions of the year and his 2016 exhibition Milton Avery’s Vermont was lauded as being “as close to a perfect show as mere mortals can mount.”

The Bennington Historical Society is a volunteer-run program of Bennington Museum. The BHS offers its programs at no charge with support from Williams Financial. You can support the efforts of the BHS to share the history of our region by making a donation.