I will go out of my way to see the home of a writer who interests me. Here I must confess: I am a geek about writers’ houses. What an opportunity I had missed by not knowing all this in 1979. Years later, after I became a mom myself, the lives of writers who are mothers became a point of fascination for me. Single and in my twenties in 1979, the fact that Shirley Jackson was a mom would not have interested me.

(Welden’s story would also inspire Donna Tartt, who was a student at Bennington in the 1980s, to write her 1992 novel, The Secret History.) Finally, I had no idea that in addition to her gothic fiction, Jackson had penned rollickingly funny magazine essays about raising her four children that were collected and published in Life Among the Savages (1953) and Raising Demons (1957). The mystery inspired Jackson to write her second novel Hangsaman (1951). I had no inkling of the 1946 disappearance of Bennington College student Paula Jean Welden who had gone for a hike alone on a nearby wooded trail and to this day has never been found. I also had no that Jackson’s husband, literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, had taught at the college for 25 years. At that time, I had no idea Jackson had lived just a few feet from the college’s back entrance. I had been to North Bennington once before, in July 1979, to attend a writing workshop at Bennington College. She also died there, suddenly, upstairs in her own house, on August 8th, 1965. Jackson lived and wrote in North Bennington for 17 years-over half her adult life.

Four years ago, in July 2012, I drove from my home in Pennsylvania to the small village of North Bennington, Vermont, to research author Shirley Jackson, who was born 100 years ago this December.

Jackson tor house