June 1948, Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery” — a dark fable about a ritual stoning conducted in an apparently ordinary village — roiled the readers of The New Yorker, generating more mail than the magazine had ever before received in response to a work of fiction. A few months later, Jackson arrived at the hospital to deliver her third child. The clerk asked for her occupation. “Writer,” she replied. “I’ll just put down housewife,” came the response... During her lifetime, she was equally well known for her best-selling memoirs about her boisterous family, which included four children, a menagerie of pets, and — not incidentally — her husband, literary critic and Bennington faculty member Stanley Edgar Hyman. The idea that she was ever “just a housewife” sounds crudely reductionist.