Is Shirley Jackson a Great American Writer?

Short answer: Yes.

Long answer: Yes, she is.

via Salon.com

Is Shirley Jackson a great American writer?
The author of “The Lottery” is still not getting the respect she deserves

Jackson… wrote during more or less the same period, but where the fiction of Mailer and Bellow is expansive, hers is (intentionally) claustrophobic. She was the bard of the domestic nightmare (as Ruth Franklin astutely pointed out in a recent essay for the New Republic), of people who were trapped, excluded, usurped and pushed in a corner to wither away unnoticed. If there was anything Homeric about her — and come to think of it, I believe there was — it was the serene pitilessness with which she dispensed their doom.