In today's Wall Street Journal, Blake Bailey, who is working on a biography of Philip Roth, reviews the new biography of Shirley Jackson by Ruth Franklin.

I haven’t read Shirley Jackson yet, but I have her novel, The Bird’s Nest, because the plot is explicitly about a person with multiple personality, and it was published in 1954, three years before “The Three Faces of Eve,” a 1957 nonfiction book and movie, made the subject popular.

Blake Bailey does not wonder why Shirley Jackson would come up with a multiple personality novel at a time when multiple personality was not a popular subject and no recent cases had been reported, or why she would have been motivated to study the subject by reading Morton Prince’s The Dissociation of a Personality, a nonfiction book about a case of multiple personality that had been published back in 1906.

Perhaps Mr. Bailey will think about multiple personality for his biography of Philip Roth (search Philip Roth in this blog).