Life Among the Savages was published by Farrar, Straus and Young in 1953. It is Shirley Jackson’s first book-length work of domestic humor — a memoir of family life that surprised readers who knew her primarily as the author of “The Lottery” and other tales of psychological darkness. Yet the book is entirely consistent with Jackson’s sensibility: the “savages” of the title are her own children, and the humor derives from the same source as her horror — the recognition that domestic life is inherently chaotic, ungovernable, and resistant to the rational control we imagine we exercise over it.
The Book
Life Among the Savages chronicles the Jackson-Hyman household in North Bennington, Vermont — Shirley, her husband Stanley Edgar Hyman (a literary critic and professor at Bennington College), and their four children: Laurence, Joanne, Sally, and Barry. The book is organized loosely around domestic episodes: moving into the house, coping with illnesses, managing school conferences, surviving holidays, and navigating the small Vermont community’s attitudes toward a family that was, by local standards, spectacularly disorganized.
Jackson’s comedy is physical and specific. Children break things, say inappropriate things to visitors, demand impossible things at impossible times. The house is always falling apart. Cats multiply. Deadlines approach while the family generates an unending series of crises that are individually trivial and collectively overwhelming.
But Jackson being Jackson, there is always something more happening beneath the comic surface. The domestic chaos that makes readers laugh is also, recognizably, the same material that feeds her darker fiction. A house with a mind of its own, children who resist parental authority, a community that watches and judges — these are the elements of horror as much as comedy. The difference is simply the tone Jackson chooses to adopt.
Composition and Context
The book’s chapters originated as pieces for women’s magazines — primarily Good Housekeeping and Woman’s Home Companion — where Jackson published prolifically throughout the late 1940s and 1950s. These magazines paid well (crucial for a family perpetually short of money), and Jackson crafted her domestic pieces with the same care she brought to her literary fiction.
The magazine context is important. Jackson was writing for an audience of women who were expected to find domestic life fulfilling and who were made to feel inadequate when they didn’t. Jackson’s humor offered a covert form of rebellion — her household’s cheerful dysfunction was a relief to readers who were struggling with the same chaos but were told they should be managing it effortlessly.
Jackson as Comic Writer
Life Among the Savages reveals a side of Jackson that her horror fiction obscures: she was one of the funniest American writers of the mid-twentieth century. Her comedy is observational rather than satirical, rooted in the precise recording of how children actually talk, how houses actually deteriorate, and how parents actually cope (or fail to cope) with the relentless demands of family life.
The book’s influence on later domestic humor — Erma Bombeck, Jean Kerr, and the entire tradition of comedic parenting writing — is substantial, though Jackson’s work has a literary quality and an underlying darkness that distinguishes it from its imitators.
Publication History
The first edition was published by Farrar, Straus and Young, New York, in 1953. First printings are identified by:
- Farrar, Straus and Young imprint on title page
- First printing indicators on copyright page
- Dust jacket with humorous illustration
- Cloth binding
The book was a commercial success — significantly outselling Jackson’s literary novels and story collections. A sequel, Raising Demons (1957), followed.
Collecting Life Among the Savages
First edition (Farrar, Straus and Young, 1953): Fine copies in dust jacket bring $200–$500. The book was printed in larger numbers than Jackson’s literary fiction due to its commercial appeal, but fine copies with bright, undamaged jackets are not common after seventy years.
Signed copies are scarce. Jackson died in 1965 at age forty-eight, limiting the total number of signed copies in circulation. Signed firsts bring $800–$2,000.
The book benefits from the broader Jackson revival of the 2010s and 2020s — driven by the Ruth Franklin biography Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (2016) and renewed critical and popular interest in Jackson’s complete body of work. Collectors increasingly seek her domestic humor alongside her horror and literary fiction.