The Road Through the Wall

The Road Through the Wall is a 1948 novel by author Shirley Jackson. It draws upon Jackson's own experiences growing up in Burlingame, California.[2]

The Road Through the Wall
The original cover of The Road Through the Wall
AuthorShirley Jackson
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Genre
Set in1936
PublisherFarrar, Straus
Publication date
1948
Media type
  • hardcover novel
  • paperback
Pages220[1]
ISBN978-0445031289 second edition, 1976
Followed by'Hangsaman 

Background

The Road Through the Wall was Jackson's first novel. She began writing it while her husband, literature critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, was writing a book of literary analysis, titled The Armed Vision. Jackson loosely based the novel on her childhood, growing up in an affluent California neighborhood. She also admitted that she wrote the book, in part, to get back at her parents, whom she resented for their narrow-mindedness and greed, stating that a writer's first novel has to be the one in which they get back at their parents.[3]

Plot summary

The novel relates life on Pepper Street, a suburban, middle-class neighborhood in Cabrillo, California. It takes place in 1936. The residents consider themselves upstanding citizens, although they are highly parochial in their worldview; for example, they refuse to socialize with the neighborhood's one Jewish family or with a working mother of a disabled child who rents a home on the street. The novel describes the way in which a hole being torn through the wall that has long cut off the end of the street disrupts life in the community.

Critical reception

Reviewing Jackson's first novel in the Montreal Gazette, Wilbur Atchison wrote: "Miss Jackson is no Sinclair Lewis; she is only 28. But she does in her most recent work show a remarkable talent for putting on paper the everyday happenings which at times make life a pleasure and sometimes make it pretty grim."[4]

gollark: Not really.
gollark: The only infinite scroll thing on my website is the infinite lorem ipsum page, as a joke which probably will eat all your RAM.
gollark: Not deleting the top entries you've scrolled past, or something.
gollark: Lazy loading doesn't stop it from using lots of RAM. They just programmed it poorly, I guess.
gollark: I run Discord in the browser, personally, to mildly reduce RAM use and data gathering, and use old reddit because new reddit is just terrible.

References
  1. "The Road Through the Wall overview". Goodreads. Retrieved 21 February 2017.
  2. The Road Through the Wall by Shirley Jackson, Book Review, Popular Library, 1976
  3. Franklin, Ruth (September 27, 2016). Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. New York: Liveright.
  4. Montreal Gazette, May 22, 1948
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