Ruth Franklin


Ruth Franklin is an American literary critic. She is a former editor at The New Republic and an Adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. Her first biography, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography and was named a The New York Times Notable Book of 2016.

Early life and education

Growing up, Franklin attended the Park School of Baltimore. During her senior year of high school, Franklin interned at a newspaper where she experienced sexual harassment from older reporters. After graduating, Franklin enrolled in Columbia University for her Bachelor of Arts degree in English Language and Literature. She later graduated from Harvard University with a Master's degree in Comparative Literature.

Career

In 1999, Franklin began her literary critiquing career at The New Republic. While working as a senior critic, she published her first book titled A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction in 2010. In Franklin's book A Thousand Darknesses, she critiqued the assumption that Holocaust survivor testimonies were completely factual and should be taken as such. Heidi E. Bollinger describes it as, "Her study questions the privileging of autobiography over fiction and endorses imagination as a form of truth-telling." Franklin instead argued that Holocaust literature was better understood through fiction. As a result, she was the co-recipient of the 2012 Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism alongside David Yaffe and named a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize.
The following year, she was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and began writing her second book, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. She spent six years conducting research for her book, including sorting through Jackson's archives at the Library of Congress. Upon its publication, she won the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography and was named a finalist for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. The book was also named a The New York Times Notable Book of 2016 and one of Time magazines top nonfiction book of the year. The following year, she received the 2017 Phi Beta Kappa Society Book Award and Plutarch Award.

Selected publications