The Story Archive

Hangsaman

Shirley Jackson · 1951 CE · Novel · Modern / American · Contemporary

Seventeen-year-old Natalie Waite leaves a domineering literary father, and a garden party she will not talk about, for her first term at a small women's college. The other students already have their sets, the faculty wife who takes her up wants an audience, and the private interrogations Natalie stages in her head keep getting longer. Written while Jackson was living at Bennington, where her husband taught and where a student had vanished in 1946.

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