Ruth Franklin
“Now more than ever, I think the critic’s role is to suss out books and authors who aren’t being given the attention they deserve and make a case for their importance, rather than to codify canons or reaffirm popular taste. As the publishing world is becoming more centralized and conservative, it’s the responsibility of critics to push back: to reject the same-old “Great American Novels” dressed up in new guises and seek out what’s new and exciting.”
“Ruth Franklin is the biographer Jackson needed: she tells the story of the author in a way that made me want to reread every word Jackson ever wrote.”
“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.”
“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.”
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 about 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. In The Washington Post, Elaine Showalter called it “a sympathetic and masterful biography that both uncovers Jackson’s secret and haunting life and repositions her as a major artist.” Her next book is The Many Lives of Anne Frank, coming from Yale University Press, 2024.
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 was asked by the New York Institute of Humanities about how she conducts research and how long it took to write the Jackson biography: “I spent about six years on [the book]. A lot of it was spent doing archival research. Jackson’s archives are in the Library of Congress, about 50 boxes full of papers. And then her husband, Stanley Hyman, has his own archives at the Library of Congress, so that’s another 50 boxes or so. Along the way I was able to uncover more correspondence in people’s private collections. So it was mostly that and also a lot of interviewing. I travelled around, to California where two of Jackson’s children live, and to Vermont, where her other two children live, and to various other places. I interviewed students who studied with Stanley Hyman, and neighbors who had lived near Jackson and Hyman.”
Franklin attended Columbia as an undergraduate, and holds a Masters in Comparative Literature from Harvard. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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