Hangsaman was published by Farrar, Straus and Young, New York, in April 1951, in a small first printing priced at $3.00. It was Jackson’s second novel, following The Road Through the Wall (1948), and it remains the least read of her major works — overshadowed by the fame of “The Lottery,” Hill House, and Castle. This neglect is undeserved. Hangsaman is a disturbing, formally innovative novel about the dissolution of identity, and it contains some of the most unsettling passages Jackson ever wrote.
The Novel
Natalie Waite is seventeen, the daughter of a domineering, intellectual father who treats her as an extension of his own ego. At a garden party before she leaves for college, something happens to her — Jackson implies a sexual assault by one of her father’s friends, but the scene is rendered through Natalie’s dissociative consciousness and never made explicit. At college (clearly modelled on Bennington, where Jackson’s husband Stanley Edgar Hyman taught), Natalie struggles to connect. The other students are cliquish and cruel. The faculty is indifferent or predatory. A female English professor and her husband form a suffocating social orbit.
Natalie retreats into an interior world, eventually creating — or discovering — a companion named Tony, who may be an imaginary friend, a split personality, or a genuine supernatural presence. The novel’s final section follows Natalie and Tony into the woods in a sequence that echoes fairy-tale logic: the forest as a space outside civilisation where transformation occurs. Whether Natalie returns from the woods sane or insane, cured or further damaged, is left deliberately unclear.
The Bennington Connection
The novel draws on Jackson’s own experience at Bennington, where she lived from 1945 until her death. The small, progressive women’s college provided a hothouse atmosphere that fascinated and disturbed her. The novel also references the real-life disappearance of Paula Jean Welden, a Bennington student who vanished while hiking the Long Trail in December 1946. Her body was never found. Jackson was deeply affected by the case, and its echoes run through the novel’s final wilderness sequence.
Collecting Hangsaman
First edition (1951, Farrar, Straus and Young): Small first printing, $3.00.
Identification points:
- Farrar, Straus and Young imprint
- First printing stated
- Dust jacket scarce
Approximate market values:
- Fine/Fine in dust jacket: $2,000–$6,000
- Signed first edition: $5,000–$15,000
- Without jacket: $200–$500
Value trajectory: Rising with the broader Jackson market. The novel was largely out of print for decades before Penguin Classics reissued it, and the renewed critical attention has increased collector interest. Copies in dust jacket are genuinely rare. This is the Jackson novel most likely to be “discovered” by collectors who have already acquired Hill House and Castle.
Jackson’s Interior Horror
Hangsaman previews the techniques Jackson would perfect in The Haunting of Hill House: the unreliable consciousness, the blurring of interior and exterior reality, the use of social comedy as a surface over psychological abyss. Natalie’s voice — bright, ironic, and gradually fragmenting — anticipates Eleanor Vance’s. The novel demonstrates that Jackson’s interest in horror was always psychological rather than supernatural: the scariest thing in her fiction is a mind coming apart.