Ruth Franklin

Join us for a special Halloween edition of Stories of Strange Women podcast as we welcome book critic and award-winning Shirley Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin! In this episode we explore Franklin’s epic biography Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life — discussing Jackson taking her crown as Read More

Join us for a special Halloween edition of Stories of Strange Women podcast as we welcome book critic and award-winning Shirley Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin! In this episode we explore Franklin’s epic biography Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life — discussing Jackson taking her crown as the queen of horror, being a female writer in the 40s and 50s, managing a demanding husband, four children and work, growing up as an outsider with a verbally abusive mother, her struggle with mental illness, Jackson as a feminist and her reputation as a witch.

Franklin is a former editor of The New Republic. Her biography, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography 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.”

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 and a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library.