The Road Through the Wall
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The compelling novel that began Shirley Jackson's legendary career
Pepper Street is a really nice, safe California neighborhood. The houses are tidy and the lawns are neatly mowed. Of course, the country club is close by, and lots of pleasant folks live there. The only problem is they knocked down the wall at the end of the street to make way for a road to a new housing development. Now, that’s not good—it’s just not good at all. Satirically exploring what happens when a smug suburban neighborhood is breached by awful, unavoidable truths, The Road Through the Wall is the tale that launched Shirley Jackson’s heralded career.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Shirley Jackson
Shirley Jackson was an American author who is best known for the short story “The Lottery” and the horror novel The Haunting of Hill House. Married to the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, Jackson cultivated a literary lifestyle, writing full time and developing relationships with literary colleagues. A gifted writer, Jackson frequently took inspiration from the events and locales of rural Vermont, where she and her family resided, and from the exploits of her children, which were chronicled in Life Among the Savages. Jackson died of heart failure in 1965.
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