Franklin wrote the award-winning and critically acclaimed 2016 biography, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life.
“Many of us know the short story, ‘The Lottery.’ What we may not know is the fascinating life of its author,” said Dr. Laura Michele Diener, an associate professor of history and director of women’s studies at Marshall. “Shirley Jackson struggled with finding artistic fulfillment while being a perfect 1950s housewife. She also grappled with the restrictive social climate of her time; as a college-educated woman with progressive literary friends, married to a Jewish man, she frequently confronted the hostility of McCarthy’s America. As Franklin will discuss, these tensions bubbled to the surface in her acclaimed horror stories.”
The event is free and open to the public, offered as the annual Charlotte Schmidlapp Distinguished Lecture in Women’s Studies. The presentation is supported by the Schmidlapp family, and by the Women’s and Gender Studies program, College of Liberal Arts, and Fifth Third Bank.