Table Of ContentTable of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
ONE
TWO
THREE
APPENDIX: HANDBILL
FOR THE BEST IN PAPERBACKS, LOOK FOR THE
FOR THE BEST IN PAPERBACKS, LOOK FOR THE
PENGUIN BOOKS
LIFE AMONG THE SAVAGES
Shirley Jackson was born in San Francisco in 1916. She first received wide
critical acclaim for her short story “The Lottery,” which was published in 1949.
Her novels—which include The Sundial, The Bird’s Nest, Hangsaman, The
Road through the Wall, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Penguin), in
addition to The Haunting of Hill House (Penguin)—are characterized by her use
of realistic settings for tales that often involve elements of horror and the occult.
Raising Demons and Life Among the Savages are her two works of nonfiction.
Come Along With Me (Penguin) is a collection of stories, lectures, and part of the
novel she was working on when she died in 1965.
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,
Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in the United States of America by
Farrar, Straus and Young 1953
Published in Penguin Books 1997
Copyright Shirley Jackson, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1951, 1952, 1953 Copyright The Crowell-Collier Publishing
Company, 1953 Copyright renewed Lawrence Hyman, Joan Schnurer, Barry Hyman, and Sarah Webster,
1975, 1976, 1977, 1979, 1980, 1981 All rights reserved
Portions of this book have appeared in other forms in Charm, Collier’s,
Good Housekeeping, Harper’s, Mademoiselle, Woman’s Day, and Woman’s
Home Companion. The section which was originally published as
“Charles” in Mademoiselle and The Lottery is included here at
the request of the author’s older son.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 53–7087
ISBN : 978-1-10154954-4
http://us.penguingroup.com
For the Children’s Grandparents
ONE
OUR HOUSE is old, and noisy, and full. When we moved into it we had two
children and about five thousand books; I expect that when we finally overflow
and move out again we will have perhaps twenty children and easily half a
million books; we also own assorted beds and tables and chairs and rocking
horses and lamps and doll dresses and ship models and paint brushes and
literally thousands of socks. This is the way of life my husband and I have fallen
into, inadvertently, as though we had fallen into a well and decided that since
there was no way out we might as well stay there and set up a chair and a desk
and a light of some kind; even though this is our way of life, and the only one we
know, it is occasionally bewildering, and perhaps even inexplicable to the sort of
person who does not have that swift, accurate conviction that he is going to step
on a broken celluloid doll in the dark. I cannot think of a preferable way of life,
except one without children and without books, going on soundlessly in an
apartment hotel where they do the cleaning for you and send up your meals and
all you have to do is lie on a couch and—as I say, I cannot think of a preferable
way of life, but then I have had to make a good many compromises, all told.
I look around sometimes at the paraphernalia of our living—sandwich bags,
typewriters, little wheels off things—and marvel at the complexities of
civilization with which we surround ourselves; would we be pleased, I wonder,
at a wholesale elimination of these things, so that we were reduced only to
necessities (coffeepot, typewriters, the essential little wheels off things) and then
—this happening usually in the springtime—I begin throwing things away, and it
turns out that although we can live agreeably without the little wheels off things,
new little wheels turn up almost immediately. This is, I suspect, progress. They
can make new little wheels, if not faster than they can fall off things, at least
faster than I can throw them away.
I remember the morning, long ago, when the landlord called. Our son Laurie
was three and a half, and our daughter Jannie was six months old, and I had the
lunch almost ready and the diapers washed, along with the little shirts and the
nightgowns and the soakers and the cotton blankets, and they were all drying on
the line (and I don’t care what anyone says, that’s a morning’s work, when you
consider that I had also made brownies and emptied the ashtrays) and then the
