Shirley Jackson was born in 1916 in San Francisco, California. She was best known as a writer of horror and mystery. Her stories and essays were published in The Saturday Evening Post, Redbook and The New Yorker. In 1948, The New Yorker published the controversial story, The Lottery, generating the most mail ever in the magazine's history. Jackson wrote such novels as The Haunting of Hill House , We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Life Among the Savages. The author died of heart failure in 1965 in North Bennington, Vermont.