Shirley Jackson was born in San Francisco in 1916. Her mother was a housewife and her father was an employee of a lithographing company. Most of her early life was spent in Burlingame, California, which she later used as the setting for her first novel, The Road Through the Wall (1948). As a child, she was obsessed with writing, keeping journals to chart her progress. She attended the University of Rochester in upstate New York, but, after suffering from mental depression that was to recur periodically throughout her life, she left school to concentrate solely on writing. She lived quietly at home, writing prolific amounts of material; she conscientiously churned out a thousand works of prose a day. In 1937, she entered Syracuse University, where she published stories in the student literary magazine. It was there that she met her future husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman. After she received her BA degree, Jackson turned to writing full-time, while her husband became a highly respected literary critic. They had four children and settled their family in a large Victorian house in Vermont, where Hyman taught literature at Bennington College. Jackson and Hyman hosted many of the leading literary figures of the 20th century at their home, including Ralph Ellison, J.D. Salinger, Bernard Malamud and Dylan Thomas. She passed away in 1965. 

Jackson was methodical and disciplined as she wrote daily for long periods between regular naps. Her first national publication was a humorous story written after a job at a department store during the Christmas rush. "My Life with R. H. Macy" appeared in The New Republic in 1941. She wrote regularly for The Reader's Digest, Colliers, and during the 1950's, published at least 44 short stories, six articles, two book-length family chronicles, one children's nonfiction book, and four novels, all the while raising four children. Despite the demands of rearing her family, she maintained a strict writing schedule, which was rarely interrupted. Jackson's most critically acclaimed work includes "The Lottery", often dramatized and televised, and her novel The Haunting of Hill House successfully adapted into the horror film THE HAUNTING. Ultimately, she wrote over 100 novels, novellas, short stories, plays, children’s books and television scripts. Her work is a major influence on such noted writers as Stephen King, Richard Matheson and Peter Straub.

Jackson's works cover a wide range of themes from psychological horror to family. According to Jonathan Lethem, Jackson was “one of this century's most luminous and strange American writers” whose " forté was psychology and society, people in other words - people disturbed, dispossessed, misunderstanding or thwarting one another compulsively, people colluding absently in monstrous acts”. For example, in her American Gothic novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Jackson brilliantly isolates the two aspects of her psyche into two odd, damaged sisters: one hypersensitive, afraid, and agoraphobic, the other a squalid demon prankster who may or may not have murdered the rest of her family for her fragile sister's sake. In addition to her horror stories, Jackson also wrote humorous stories about her chaotic domestic life in such works as Raising Demons and Life Among the Savages

Supported by the Jackson family, The Shirley Jackson Award is granted annually to an author for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror and the dark fantastic in the categories of novel, novella, novelette, short story, single-author collection, and edited anthology.