Shirley Jackson, in full Shirley Hardie Jackson, (born December 14, 1916, San Francisco, California, U.S.—died August 8, 1965, North Bennington, Vermont), American novelist and short-story writer best known for her story “The Lottery” (1948).

Jackson graduated from Syracuse University in 1940 and married the American literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman. They settled in North Bennington in 1945. Life Among the Savages (1953) and Raising Demons (1957) are witty and humorous fictionalized memoirs about their life with their four children. The light comic tone of those books contrasts sharply with the dark pessimism of Jackson’s other works, whose general theme is the presence of evil and chaos just beneath the surface of ordinary everyday life. “The Lottery,” a chilling tale whose meaning has been much debated, provoked widespread public outrage when it was first published in The New Yorker in 1948. Jackson’s six finished novels, especially The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), further established her reputation as a master of gothic horror and psychological suspense.

Let Me Tell You (2015) was a posthumously issued collection of stories and essays, the majority of which had never been published.

Mark Twain, orig. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, (born Nov. 30, 1835, Florida, Mo., U.S.—died April 21, 1910, Redding, Conn.), U.S. humorist, writer, and lecturer. He grew up in Hannibal, Mo., on the Mississippi River and was apprenticed in 1848 to a local printer. He received a riverboat pilot’s license in 1859 and later moved on to Nevada and California. In 1863 he took his pseudonym, the riverman’s term for water 2 fathoms (12 ft [3.7 m]) deep. In a California mining camp he heard the story that he first published in 1865 and made famous as the title story of his first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches (1867). He traveled widely, using his travels as subject matter for lectures and books, from the humorous narratives The Innocents Abroad (1869) and Roughing It (1872) to Life on the Mississippi (1883), his reflections on being a riverboat captain. He won a worldwide audience for his adventure stories of boyhood, especially Tom Sawyer (1876) and Huckleberry Finn (1885), one of the masterpieces of American fiction. The satirical A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and increasingly grim works including Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) and The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg (1899) followed. In the 1890s financial speculations bankrupted him. His eldest daughter died in 1896, his wife in 1904, and another daughter in 1909. He expressed his pessimism about human character in such late works as the posthumously published Letters from the Earth (1962).

Margaret Atwood, in full Margaret Eleanor Atwood, (born November 18, 1939, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada), Canadian writer best known for her prose fiction and for her feminist perspective.

As an adolescent, Atwood divided her time between Toronto, her family’s primary residence, and the sparsely settled bush country in northern Canada, where her father, an entomologist, conducted research. She began writing at age five and resumed her efforts, more seriously, a decade later. After completing her university studies at Victoria College at the University of Toronto, Atwood earned a master’s degree in English literature from Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1962.

In her early poetry collections, Double Persephone (1961), The Circle Game (1964, revised in 1966), and The Animals in That Country (1968), Atwood ponders human behaviour, celebrates the natural world, and condemns materialism. Role reversal and new beginnings are recurrent themes in her novels, all of them centred on women seeking their relationship to the world and the individuals around them. The Handmaid’s Tale (1985; film 1990; opera 2000) is constructed around the written record of a woman living in sexual slavery in a repressive Christian theocracy of the future that has seized power in the wake of an ecological upheaval; a TV series based on the novel premiered in 2017 and was cowritten by Atwood. The Booker Prize-winning The Blind Assassin (2000) is an intricately constructed narrative centring on the memoir of an elderly Canadian woman ostensibly writing in order to dispel confusion about both her sister’s suicide and her own role in the posthumous publication of a novel supposedly written by her sister.

Philip K. Dick, in full Philip Kindred Dick, (born December 16, 1928, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.—died March 2, 1982, Santa Ana, California), American science-fiction writer whose novels and short stories often depict the psychological struggles of characters trapped in illusory environments.

Dick worked briefly in radio before studying at the University of California, Berkeley, for one year. The publication of his first story, “Beyond Lies the Wub,” in 1952 launched his full-time writing career, which was marked by extraordinary productivity, as he oftentimes completed a new work, usually a short story or a novella, every two weeks for printing in pulp paperback collections. He published his first novel, Solar Lottery, in 1955. Early in Dick’s work the theme emerged that would remain his central preoccupation—that of a reality at variance with what it appeared or was intended to be. In such novels as Time out of Joint (1959), The Man in the High Castle (1962; Hugo Award winner; television series 2015–19), and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), the protagonists must determine their own orientation in an “alternate world.” Beginning with The Simulacra (1964) and culminating in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968; adapted for film as Blade Runner [1982]), the illusion centres on artificial creatures at large and grappling with what is authentic in a real world of the future.

After years of drug abuse and mental illness, Dick died impoverished and with little literary reputation outside of science-fiction circles. By the 21st century, however, he was widely regarded as a master of imaginative, paranoid fiction in the vein of Franz Kafka and Thomas Pynchon. While his works can definitively be categorized as science fiction, Dick was notable for focusing not on the trappings of futuristic technology, as many writers in the genre do, but on the discomfiting effects that these radically different—and often dystopian—surroundings have on the characters.

Among Dick’s numerous story collections are A Handful of Darkness (1955), The Variable Man and Other Stories (1957), The Preserving Machine (1969), and the posthumously published I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon (1985). Several of his short stories and novels were adapted for film, including “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” (filmed as Total Recall [1990 and 2012]), “Second Variety” (filmed as Screamers [1995]), “The Minority Report” (filmed as Minority Report [2002]), and A Scanner Darkly (1977; film 2006). The Man in the High Castle was loosely adapted as a serial drama (2015–19) that was streamed online by Amazon.com.